Forty Years On : Anniversary Exhibition
Jeffery Camp, Julian Cooper, Derek Hyatt, George Rowlett
27 March - 22 May 2026
A Catalogue of the Exhibition is available View Catalogue on-line
In April 2026, Michael Richardson will celebrate 40 years of running Art Space Gallery in Islington, one of the leading commercial galleries showing modern figurative and landscape-based art in London. For Art Space's 25th anniversary in 2011, the critic Andrew Lambirth wrote: 'A gallery is a building in which to show art, but it is also more than that, it is a collective identity, compounded of the kind of art on show and the dealer's personality.'
That 'collective identity' has embraced both established and emerging artists, with an impressive roster of visiting exhibitors including Leon Kossoff, Terry Setch, Nigel Hall, Roy Oxlade, Anthony Eyton, Michael Sandle, John Wonnacott and Euan Uglow. These have all exhibited at the gallery over the years, sometimes in solo shows, sometimes in group ones. But for this special anniversary, Michael Richardson has decided to focus on four artists, cornerstones of his approach to art dealing, four artists the Gallery has represented since the 1990s, and whose work he thinks sums up the culture of Art Space.
Jeffery Camp (1923-2020) was a kind of father figure or elder statesman to the gallery, a painter who brought a wonderfully idiosyncratic slant to everything he looked at, everything he painted or drew. One of the most underrated of that generation of artists which includes Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews and Lucian Freud, Camp's generosity of spirit is everywhere evident in his art. His drawing takes you to the heart of a subject, his colour gives it emotional resonance, his brush places the paint with exactitude and poetry.
Julian Cooper (born 1947) is a third-generation mountainpainter who has travelled the world only to return to his beloved Cumbria to paint the fells and dales. He may paint rock faces in all their magnificence, but he is also deeply involved in the debates of Modernism, and has learnt a lot from abstract art. Not for him a photographic realism, but rather an interpretation of landscape that involves both form and content equally. His is a visceral and Romantic approach, based on his own experiences as a climber, but the activity and identity of the paint itself always remain paramount.
Derek Hyatt (1931-2015) kept reworking his paintings because the landscape changed around him as the weather and the light changed. He tried to capture some of this mystery of appearance in his native Yorkshire, by paying close attention to the marks he found everywhere in it: the tail fan of a grouse in the snow, generations wearing paths through the fields, the pictograms of prehistoric peoples up on the moors. He brought history and myth back into the present to enrich our understanding of the world around us.
George Rowlett (born 1941) is a painter who uses paint lavishly, in swathes of superbly judged colour to evoke the spirit and look of a landscape or garden. Put simply, if he paints a ploughed field, the paint will be ploughed by Rowlett as it goes onto the board: he makes an equivalent for the physicality of the world. His thick paint emphasises the material, the stuff, of our environment, and yet he can also summon the most precise and moving details between his cliffs and rivulets of pigment. He paints outside in front of the motif, searching for the truth of what he sees.
These four artists are not bound by any ties of artistic belief. They paint with an independence of spirit, integrity, and passion; a passion rooted in the long tradition to which they firmly belong. And as the artists who have travelled with Art Space Gallery the longest, they offer together a chance to celebrate the collective history and achievements of the Gallery through the work of four of a very distinguished group of British artists.
A Catalogue of the Exhibition is available View Catalogue on-line
40 Years On: Anniversary Exhibition press release
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