Alan Davie & Helen Baker Exhibit at Northumbria University Gallery

Written by Edmond Etherton Monday, 09 May 2011 21:50

Newcastle, Tyne & Wear - The Northumbria University Gallery and Baring Wing in Newcastle is to present concurrent exhibitions from two of the UK's best contemporary abstract painters. "Alan Davie: Boom Boom" and "Helen Baker: Red Rag" will both be on view from June 10th until July 22nd. Represented in many of the world’s major museums and collections, the Scottish artist Alan Davie is one of the few British painters of the last fifty years to attain an international reputation on the scale of such Americans as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Paintings, brush drawings and gouaches are included in this exhibition of Davie’s work as he improvises and develops primitivistic compositions in ‘magic landscapes’ as redolent of the esoteric mysteries of Caribbean religion as they are of the music of ancient Asian ritual. Helen Baker is a local artist, who has lived and worked in the North East of England for most of her life and is currently the Gallery Director for Gallery North at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Northumbria University.

Born in 1920 in Scotland, Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art. On graduation in 1941 he was awarded a travel scholarship but war service intervened. In 1948, newly married, he took up the scholarship and travelled to Paris, then through Switzerland to Italy. In Venice he met Peggy Guggenheim and saw work by Gorky, Rothko and Pollock who he subsequently met when he held his first major exhibition in New York in 1956. By the 1960s, Davie gloried in the sensations afforded by gliding, sailing, swimming and music both classical and jazz, all of which he was able to synthesise in his work. From pagan music of the 40’s to myth-oriented works of the 70’s and 80’s, Davie’s work can be seen as an heroic attempt to find an equivalent in the language of paint. At 91, Alan Davie works from his home in Hertford where he continues to paint, draw and create music.

“A chess-board pattern of small coloured squares is arranged in a rhythmically varied system of rectangles. Each little square also carries a  specific light-producing colour, their combined chromatic gradation creates a coloured light; complementary contrasts and slight discords break and resolve again and thus bring movement to the pattern of the colour harmony; and here and there small areas of flat colour disturb the chess-board pattern.” Werner Haftmann’s description of Robert Delaunay’s lyrical  response to light through a Parisian window could almost stand for Helen Baker’s recent paintings save that she deals with Roman light and her intentions are philosophical: not less than meditations on the transience of power. Latterly her paintings, derived from a residency at the British School in Rome, have been characterised as quivering “on the verge of their own  disintegration”. Her deliquescent colour grids act as metaphors for crumbling surfaces, weathered stucco, fading light, all contributing to an aura of “archaeological melancholy”. Occasionally, she weaves minatory texts into these correlatives of architectural and political decline but with great subtlety. If her engagement is with an abstraction aspiring to the condition of music an appropriate comparison might be with something elegiac  and nuanced:  Arvo Part’s ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ perhaps.

Established in 1977 as a teaching gallery and the University’s link between town and gown, the University Gallery’s policy is to present exhibitions by artists of national and international distinction, as well as less established but promising artists. By the early 1990s the Gallery’s international profile was firmly established with a series of major touring exhibitions of works by Edvard Munch work including the curatorship of the Frieze of Life exhibition at the National Gallery London. The Gallery continues to initiate high profile exhibitions with touring links in America, Japan, Greece, Italy and Germany while maintaining an annual programme of exhibitions by artists of regional and national distinction.  The Gallery specialises in contemporary painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography exhibitions, as well as historic and thematic loan exhibitions from national collections. Acquisitions to The Permanent Collection, comprising over 350 works, reflect the exhibition programme’s strong regional, national and international links.  Exhibitions are supported by scholarly publications, interpretative literature and an education programme for adults and children, including public lectures, art classes and study days. The Gallery also provides training and work experience for students, as well annual placements for graduate and post-graduate students from Northumbria and Newcastle Universities. In 2003/4, with grant support from the Baring Foundation, Northern Rock and the Monument Trust, the Gallery underwent a major redevelopment programme to improve access, double the exhibition space and provide a highly visible public entrance facing the City. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery

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