This exhibition provides the first opportunity to survey the entire career of Michael Andrews (1928 - 95). A notoriously slow and painstaking painter, during his lifetime Andrews had few solo exhibitions and, indeed, his oeuvre is relatively small. Nevertheless, he is rightly regarded as one of Britain's leading post-war painters.

Andrews is often linked with other artists of the so-called School of London, notably Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. In common with these artists, Andrews's art demonstrates a preoccupation with the depiction of the human figure and also, like some of them, a deep involvement with the subject of landscape. From the beginning of his career in the early 1950s, Andrews's work was characterised by intensity of observation and exacting technical virtuosity. He described painting as 'the most marvellous, elaborate way of making up my mind'.

It was his firm conviction that some sense of the world and our place within it can be formed from reflecting on human nature. For that reason, his abiding subjects are people: the rich diversity of human behaviour and the complex relationships that exist between individuals and places. Even when people are not physically present in his work - as in his paintings of balloons, fish and certain landscapes - his images are redolent with human significance.

For Andrews, the activity of painting was a way of asking questions about 'the nature of being' and it contained the potential for sharing whatever insights were gained. Towards the end of his career he observed: 'In painting, through a process of definition, I realise how I am disposed - it is reassuring to know. As none of us are so different we can share this realisation. . . hence strange consolation'.

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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.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.