Gallery V
Hung by Gus Cummins, this gallery deliberately defies any attempt to summarise its contents, which vary enormously. At one extreme is Patrick Gilmartin’s large, carefully considered and precise pencil drawing of a police horse’s saddle. At another, Will Alsop gives vent to ecstatic emotion in his splashy, vivacious painting I Wish My Garden Was Really Like This.
William Alsop RA, I Wish My Garden was Really Like This. Acrylic Photo: John Bodkin
And in between, a wide range of abstract and figurative work is embraced. Derek Boshier’s dying cowboy disintegrates into fragments like a broken jigsaw puzzle. As for Julia Hamilton’s big and resplendent dress made of collograph paper laid on canvas, it bears an eerie resemblance to a decapitated Victorian lady. And David Royle reinforces the macabre mood in the room with ghostly figures floating in a nightmarish scenario.
But Roy Oxlade helps us relax a little with his free, spare painting of a Knotted Curtain and Bath. It presents the essence of its subject alone, and vividly conveys dampness. Rose Wylie is more street-wise, defining A Man and a Woman with the verve of a graffito scrawled on an urban wall. Both of these works contrast with the more abstract contributions.
Geoffrey Clarke’s cast-aluminium sculptures derive their energy from the tension between cubic or pyramidal forms and restless protruding tubes.
