Marlborough Fine Art in London Shows US Painter John Hubbard

Written by Francine Shadwell Sunday, 01 May 2011 00:11

London.- Marlborough Fine Art is pleased to present "John Hubbard: Nocturnes" from 11th May through 7th June. The American-born artist, John Hubbard, has lived and worked in England for almost fifty years. He is a landscape painter of an unconventional type, in that he fuses elements of Chinese painting and contemporary abstraction within the tradition of late 19th century European landscape sensibility. The result is work which conveys a strong sense of the feel of landscape, its essence and physical presence. As the New York Times critic wrote in 1986: "these are paintings to be savoured by those who like consistency in art".

John Hubbard was born in 1931 and studued at the Art Students' League in New York. Starting his career in England during the 1960's, John Hubbard's early work shows strong influences of Abstract Expressionism, which was dominant in NYC when Hubbard was a student. Gradually, the colours and contours of Dorset or Greece asserted themselves in light studies and paintings of water and coastline. The darker paintings, mostly of woodland subjects, are stiller and more contemplative. During the 1970's, and after visiting Morocco, exotic colors entered his work and the mystery of the mountains as light faded or appeared, the glittering movement of water were all suggested. A growing interest in rock forms, including quarries, led Hubbard to find subjects on Dartmoor, Devon, or on the Cornish coast. This involved a greater use of drawing as a means of ascertaining the essentials of a particular subject. There were also extended drawing sessions in Kew Gardens, London, the artist's own garden and the sub-tropical gardens at Abbotsbury, Dorset. This in turn led to visits to Tresco, Scilly Isles, resulting in drawings and paintings of a strange lushness.


With a growing interest in gardens as subject-matter and as creative subjects in their own right, Hubbard made the first of several visits to the Alhambra, Granada in 1987. This began a five-year involvement with Spanish courtyards and their fusion of architecture with plant material. In 1992, Hubbard made his first journey to the western coast of Argyll. The prospect of sky, sea, islands and coastline that surrounded him became a preoccupation that continues to the present. A commission from Lord Rothschild gave Hubbard the opportunity to "paint with plants" when he created two large areas of carpet-bedding for Waddesdon Manor, Berkshire, in 1999 and 2000. Hubbard's interest in the coastal landscapes of Dorset and Cornwall has never abated. Developing many of the ideas that began in Scotland, he has embarked on a group of large and small paintings which take the refracted light and rhythms of beaches, marshland and rocky coastline, combining them so as to celebrate his belief in the benign, healing powers of nature. John Hubbard has regularly exhibited in the UK and abroad and his work hangs in the collections of the Arts Council of Great Britain, British Council, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Tate Britain and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

Marlborough Fine Art was founded in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer who emigrated to England from Vienna, where Lloyd's family had been antique dealers for three generations and Fischer had dealt in antiquarian books. In 1948 they were joined by a third partner, David Somerset, now the Duke of Beaufort, and chairman of Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd. After the wartime years of recession, London became the principal market for modern art and Marlborough's role in this changing art world was established. It set standards for exhibitions that were worthy of a modern museum. Over the years, the company has expanded and now has galleries in London, New York, Madrid, Barcelona Monaco and Chile. Throughout their history, they have been at the cutting edge of modern art, presenting museum quality shows from artists including Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Signac, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, Constantine Guys, Vincent van Gogh, Jacques Lipchitz, René Magritte, Max Beckmann, Max Bill, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Egon Schiele, Frank Auerbach, Lynn Chadwick, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, R.B.Kitaj, Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Stephen Conroy, John Davies, Bill Jacklin, Ken Kiff, John Davies, Dale Chihuly and Paula Rego. During the 1990's, Marlborough took another new step in becoming one of the first galleries in the Western world to exhibit contemporary art from China. In 1953 Marlborough had already staged a small exhibition of two Chinese painters in London and during the 1960's Marlborough exhibited the abstract paintings of the Chinese artist Lin Sho-Yu (who worked in London under the name of Richard Lin). The gallery's relationship with Chinese art took on a different dimension with the exhibition, New Art from China: Post 1979, which took place at the London gallery, from December 1994 to January 1995. In 1995 Chen Yifei, the most prominent and respected of Contemporary Chinese artists, signed an exclusive world-wide contract with Marlborough Fine Art. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.marlboroughfineart.com

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