Jerwood Gallery is delighted to announce the opening on 20 July 2013 of its summer exhibitionJeffery Camp: The Way to Beachy Head. The exhibition which runs until 2 October marks the Royal Academician’s 90th year and celebrates a body of work inspired by the landscape of coastal Sussex, particularly the dramatic chalk coastline where the South Downs meets the sea.

Over his prolific career, which has already spanned seven decades, Camp has established himself as one of the most accomplished British artists of his generation. He has been an RA since 1984 and had a major retrospective there in 1988. Art critic, Andrew Lambirth describes his paintings and drawings as ‘remarkably generous statements about the world, full of love and sensuality and a singular appreciation of beauty’.

Liz Gilmore, Director of the Jerwood Gallery, says “We are thrilled to be celebrating Jeffery Camp’s 90th year and to reappraise one of Britain’s most accomplished artists through a body of work inspired by the sea, shore and fields of Sussex and particularly of Beachy Head, one of his favourite subjects”.

Jeffery Camp was born in East Anglia on 17th April 1923 and studied at Lowestoft and Ipswich Art Schools, followed by Edinburgh College of Art in 1941. He taught at Chelsea School of Art in 1960-61 and went on to teach at the Slade School of Fine Art, London between 1963 to 1988. He has exhibited at Gallerie de Seine, Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery, the New Art Centre, Browse and Darby and now at Micheal and Oya Richardson’s Art Space Gallery. He was chosen by Nigel Greenwood to appear in the 1985 Hayward Annual and in 1988 had a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts followed by retrospective exhibitions at South London Gallery and the Serpentine. His work is held in the collections of the Tate, the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Government Art Collection and the Jerwood Gallery.

The exhibition has been developed in partnership with Art Space Gallery, London.

http://www.jerwoodgallery.org/

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.