The Artspace Gallery To Showcase New Works by Martin Greenland

Written by Michael Koenig Friday, 02 September 2011 00:22

London.- Artspace Gallery is pleased to present "Martin Greenland: Uncharted Land", on view at the gallery from September 16th through October 14th. Martin Greenland, the first prize winner of John Moores 24 in 2006, is a landscape painter whose images of a lyrical pastoral coexist with an underlying darker side. In this, his second solo exhibition at Art Space Gallery, there is snow-capped peaks, ice-cold cataracts, dense forests, deserted valleys and an unerring eye for a heightened reality that suggests a retreat from the modern world into a private sanctuary of childhood memories and associations of an industrial age in decline.

Born (1962) and brought up in Yorkshire and now living and working in the Lake District this is far from escapist art. Indeed, a recurrent theme in the work is the sometimes ambivalent interaction between the urban environment and the countryside. And although the paintings draw on actual places he has visited they are in fact creations of the imagination and memory; an assemblage of remembered topographical detail interwoven with traces of an ominous human presence. Throughout, this mood of mystery and strangeness is conjured up by the dramatic contrasts between the bleak collections of decaying buildings in an idyllic setting or the detritus at the base of a ravine or the total absence of people despite the huts, street lamps, fires and washing lines in the dense massing of trees. Underpinned by a symbolic use of light that is firmly in the Northern European Romantic tradition they are paintings that the British dramatist Willy Russell has described as being ….a striking fusion of arresting myth and exquisite landscape.


Art Space Gallery was founded in 1986 by Michael and Oya Richardson and soon came to be recognised as one of London's foremost venues dedicated to showing and promoting serious painting. In 1993 the art critic and writer Keith Patrick, then chairman of the British section of the International Association of Art Critics wrote that: "Art Space Gallery is one of those rare galleries which spontaneously attract the interest of artists and many distinguished names are frequent visitors to its exhibitions. This is even more remarkable given that the gallery is situated in a quiet corner of Islington and not in the commercial centre of Bond Street. This ground-level support is an indication of the success of the gallery's policy. Over a period when the art market has been particularly prone to the vagaries of fashion Art Space has followed its own instincts. Above all its directors - Michael and Oya Richardson - have maintained a commitment to painterly figuration and have come to identify the gallery with a direction which has remained significant in British art for forty years. It is to their credit that they have extended our knowledge of the contemporary end of that tradition.." Since then the gallery has grown along with many of its earlier artists to become one of London's leading galleries for contemporary painting where the work of young artists can be seen along with those of established reputations. As David Lee commented in Arts Review in 1998: "… Art Space Gallery has an eye for the more refined art student and is always worth visiting with a view to buying now what will indubitably be more expensive later…" The Gallery celebrated its 21st anniversary with a major exhibition of Jeffery Camp in April 2007 and continues to have showcase exhibitions of foremost British painters including the recent "Unique Prints" by Leon Kossoff, Terry Setch and the forthcoming Michael Sandle sculpture and drawings. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.artspacegallery.co.uk

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