BLAKESTON, Oswell

Oswell Blakeston - Safely Home
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Oswell Blakeston (1907-1985) was a painter, writer, film maker and critic. A man of extraordinary talents, Blakeston’s family was of Austrian origin and he was born Henry Hasslacher. At age 16 he ran away from a bourgeois upbringing to become a conjuror’s assistant, a cinema organist and then a clapper boy with David Lean at Gaumont film studios.

He began writing film criticism and, with Francis Brugiere, in the early 1930s he pioneered abstract films in Britain. As well as his painting and art criticism, Blakeston was also a novelist, playwright and poet with a “quick eye for the bizarre and the outrageous” according to his long-term partner and fellow artist Max Chapman.

Blakeston had over 40 solo shows, including Drian and Grabowski Galleries and New Vision Centre, and some 100 mixed shows. These included Leicester, Madden and Mercury Galleries. In 1981 he shared a show at Middlesborough Art Gallery with Max Chapman and in 1986 there was a memorial show at Camden Arts Centre. Victoria & Albert Museum and the Ulster Museum in Belfast hold his work, as do national galleries in Finland, Poland and Portugal.


DRECKI, Zbigniew

Zbigniew Drecki - portrait of woman

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Zbigniew Drecki (1922-1998) was born in Warsaw and survived incarceration during the war in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, eventually escaping from a train transporting him to Dachau. He moved to Britain, settling with an English wife in Exmouth in Devon. Largely self-taught, Drecki for some time ran a painting school in Exmouth but in later years he concentrated solely on his own art.

Painting in a house he and his wife owned in Florida, in addition to his Devon home, Drecki’s artwork was vibrant, colourful and at times wildly imaginative – a stark contrast to the art produced by other camp survivors such as Arnold Daghani. He appears to have been concentrating on the positive and also pursued political projects aimed at encouraging world peace and philanthropy.


EVANS, Handel

Handel Evans - Colour-Study for "The Mechanical Men"

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Handel Evans (1932-1999) was born in Pontypridd and trained at Cardiff College of Art 1949–54 where his teachers were Eric Malthouse and David Tinker. Evans, an accomplished pianist, was torn between a musical career and art but eventually turned to the latter.

He travelled widely, living and painting in the Caribbean from 1959-61 and then in Germany, Italy and the United States. Evans attended the British School at Rome in 1962-63 and in 1975-76 studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris. From the 1970s man and technology became a dominant theme in Evans’ work, which moved away from realism and increasingly drew upon Futurism, Surrealism and Cubism.

Evans’ first solo shows were in the Caribbean, in Jamaica in 1962 and 1964 and Barbados in 1968.

He held extensive exhibitions in Germany, including Deutscher Beamtenbund Berlin in 1992 and a memorial show in 1999 in Korbach Museum, and also had shows in Spain and the United States. British exhibitions included Brown’s Hotel, London in 1972 and Clare Hall, Cambridge in 1987 but he always received more acclaim internationally than in the UK.

In 2001 he was posthumously honoured in the United States with the National Welsh-American Foundation’s Contemporary Culture Award. Clare Hall Cambridge, Ashmolean Museum Oxford, Newport Museum and Art Gallery and National Gallery of Jamaica hold examples of his work. University of Aberystwyth, Wales looks after his archives and has a substantial collection of Evans’ work.


LANZI, Francois

Francois Lanzi - Into the Blue

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Francois Lanzi (1916-1988) was born in Corsica and studied art in Paris under Guillot de Raffaillac. A prisoner of war from 1940-45, he came to live in the UK in 1954 and exhibited at a number of London Galleries including Redfern Gallery 1957, Royal Society of British Artists Gallery 1959 & 1960, Savage Gallery 1961 and Royal Academy 1965. Lanzi also had a number of exhibitions at the Artists International Association (AIA) in Soho, notably a solo exhibition in April-May 1967. In addition he showed in the provinces, including Stone Gallery at Newcastle in 1961.

A promising career was stymied by Lanzi becoming a virtual recluse from the 1960s, although he continued to paint and produce collages throughout his life at his Chiddingfold, Surrey home.

A major retrospective was held in 1994 at The Gallery in Woking. Lanzi’s work was in the ICI collection and is in a number of private collections in Britain, France and the United States.


MELVILLE, John

John Melville - The Sleepers

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

John Melville (1902-1986) was born in London but moved in childhood to Birmingham where he remained until his death. Largely self-taught, Melville towards the end of the 1920s became associated with the Modern Group in Birmingham but by the early-1930s he and his brother, the noted art critic Robert Melville, were also connected with the Surrealists in London. Melville exhibited from the early 1930s at St George’s Gallery, Wertheim Gallery, Royal Society of Birmingham Artists (RBSA) and elsewhere.

The Melvilles, along with Conroy Maddox, refused to take part in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London accusing it of showing too many artists they did not consider to be Surrealists. Nevertheless, by the late 1930s and early 1940s John was regularly featured in international shows of Surrealist and Dada art and in 1938 his works were banned from an exhibition in Birmingham by local councillors as being “detrimental to public sensibility”.

Melville’s reputation suffered after the interruption of the war years and a solo exhibition at Hanover Gallery, London in 1951 was both a commercial and critical failure. Although he taught for a time at Birmingham University, Melville retreated into isolation artistically and developed along his own strange path.

His son Theo has described his works as having a “frightening quality”, showing “infinite regression, a kind of annihilation” and there being “an apocalyptic element” in his later work.

Despite a large retrospective at the R.B.S.A. Galleries in Birmingham in 1967 and a solo show of watercolours and drawings at the University of Birmingham in 1969, he remained a largely neglected painter until his reputation revived with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. Mayor Gallery then included him in its major survey of British Surrealism, whilst Blond Fine Art had a solo retrospective show in 1986, Gothick Dream Fine Art a memorial exhibition in 1987 and the Westbourne Gallery another in 1996.

Even before this ‘revival’, Melville’s paintings had remained an important part of the Surrealist canon in Britain and had been shown in the Hayward Gallery’s 1978 exhibition ‘Dado and Surrealism Reviewed’ and Galleries 1900-2000 in Paris’s ‘Les Enfants d’Alice: La Peinture Surrealiste 1930-60 en Angleterre’ in 1982.

Melville’s work is also held by the Ertegun and Filipacchi Surrealist collection (arguably the best Surrealist collection in the world) and was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York’s exhibition “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes” in 1999.

His restoration to at least a certain level of prominence was confirmed when the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery held an exhibition in 2001 entitled “Surrealism in Birmingham” to celebrate Birmingham’s contribution to the avant-garde in the 20th Century, which concentrated on Melville, Conroy Maddox and Emmy Bridgewater. Later solo retrospectives include Millinery Gallery 2006.


PAILTHORPE, Grace

Grace Pailthorpe - Surrealist composition

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Grace Pailthorpe (1883-1971) was born in Sussex and served as a surgeon in World War I. After the conflict she turned to psychology, setting up what eventually became the Portman Clinic. She met the Surrealist painter Reuben Mednikoff in 1935 and they embarked on a life study of psychological art research.

Pailthorpe fell out with the main British Surrealist group in the late 1930s but continued to paint until her death. Leeds City Art Gallery in 1998 held a major retrospective of her and Mednikoff’s work entitled Sluice Gates of the Mind. Mayor Gallery and others also showed her work.


STURGESS-LIEF, Christopher

Christopher Sturgess-Lief- The Moon of Thoth with Black Hole

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Chris Sturgess-Lief (1937-2011) was a self-taught painter who created evocative and poetic pictures using a highly individual private symbolism. Adopted as a baby, possibly from ethnic German parents in the Soviet Union, Sturgess-Lief was schooled at Sherborne, Dorset.

After army service in Malaya, he then moved to London and began showing on the Hyde Park railings in the early 1960s. He was spotted by Victor Musgrave of Gallery One, who gave Sturgess-Lief a solo show in 1962. He also exhibited at Rye Art gallery in 1969 and took part in mixed shows at New Vision Centre, Leicester Galleries, Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1963 and others in Japan and the United States.

His Red Painting was included in the Belgrave Gallery’s 1992 show British abstract art of the 1950s and 60s, and in 1997 Julian Hartnoll in St James’ put on a solo exhibition of his work.  A contemporary of the highly sought after Martin Bradley and Alan Davie, his work is comparable both in terms of style and quality.