Ivor Abrahams was born in Wigan, Lancashire and studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He was apprenticed to the Fiorini Bronze Foundry and later taught at a number of art schools including Birmingham School of Art and Goldsmiths College in London. He had his first exhibition at Gallery One, London in 1962. He was appointed a Royal Academician in 1991. Abrahams is primarily a sculptor. His early works were based on gardens, a theme he explored until about 1979. In the mid-1970s he acquired a house in the South of France and the landscape and culture of the area became the inspiration for a series of works on water-based imagery, featuring bathers and nymphs.

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Glossary

  • Bronze

    A metal alloy made from copper with up to two-thirds tin, often with other small amounts of other metals. Commonly used in casting. A work cast in bronze is sometimes referred to as 'a bronze'.

  • 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.

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