Gallery VII
Mostly abstract and by non-members, the many paintings in Gallery VII presented the hanger with an intimidating challenge. Yet Frank Bowling, a relatively new member who has not participated in the hang before, has achieved a remarkable coherence in the midst of multiplicity and diversity. His own luminous abstracts, painted on pieces of canvas sewn together like sailcloth, hang close to Natasha Zavialov’s black and heavily impastoed Night and Peter Kalkof’s cool, Constructivist composition of circles in a variety of primary colours.
Albert Irvin is here, too, as is Noel Foster with a characteristic, though unusually for him, brightly coloured composition of skeins of regularly curved lines. Richard Smith, also a regular, is represented by his distinctive lozenge format. Then there are two large compositions by students, both clearly very promising. One, by Chris Daniels, consists of a mass of overlapping rectangles; the other, Butterfly by Gabriel Hartley, is dominated by a mass of heavy, expressive lines running more or less in parallel.
Two massive wooden sculptures are instantly recognisable as the work of David Nash. Other sculptures include Natasha Lewers’s Primaries. Made of garishly coloured, flock-covered ceramic, they’re like microbiological models imagined by a cartoonist.
