New paintings and works on paper by Michael Canning  

Dean’s third solo exhibition with Waterhouse & Dodd is titled Sleepers, and investigates themes concerning our relationship to sleep; be that our fear of a period without sleep, our escape through dreams in sleep, or our experiences of sleep deprivation. Dean was inspired by a recent trip to Norway where the lack of daylight hours leads to a hallucinatory existence. The uniform winter darkness fails to provide the environmental distinction between the dreams of our night-time and the reality of our daylight waking hours.  

The dazzling Hyperphotos of French artist Jean-François Rauzier are to go on show in London for the first time between 25th November and 18th December in an exhibition at the Cork Street gallery of leading UK art dealer Waterhouse & Dodd. The show brings together 14 Hyperphotos by this pioneer of photograph, painting and technology, all of them C-Type photographic prints of extremely high quality.

Rauzier’s work is a groundbreaking marriage between art, photography and technology. It is both a methodology and a new channel of artistic expression, resulting in breathtaking images which combine the big picture and close-up to present a new and sometimes disturbing vision of the world both in composition and scale.
 

This will be Karin’s first solo exhibition in the UK, and will build on the success she has had at various domestic and international art fairs over the past 4 years.
 

A major new installation in London’s Trafalgar Square by Angela Palmer
Waterhouse & Dodd are proud to present a selection of photographs related to the project by the artist. We will also be exhibiting recent glass sculptures, including The Ashmolean Child Mummy - Three Aspects.

Our exhibition will run for the duration of the Ghost Forest installation  

Following last year’s inaugural edition of 'Routes', Waterhouse & Dodd is pleased to announce the second in the edition of this extensive and prestigious series of exhibitions of contemporary Middle Eastern & Arab art. Organised by leading London art dealers Waterhouse & Dodd at their Cork Street gallery, 'Routes II' will showcase the work of 16 eminent and emerging artists who live or who have their roots in the Middle East.  

Waterhouse & Dodd is pleased to announce the London unveiling of Mark Dickens’ prestigious commission of 10 panels to commemorate the opening of the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. Dickens, with the endorsement of Bernie Ecclestone, has collaborated with each of the 10 Formula 1™ teams and their drivers. The panels were commissioned by Abu Dhabi Motorsports Management to celebrate the cultural and sporting significance of the inaugural Formula 1™ Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.  

Waterhouse & Dodd will be exhibiting on booth numbers A13-A15 at this year's Art Hamptons. If you would like to receive complimentary tickets please kindly contact the gallery.  

New sculptures by Stephanie Carlton Smith


Downloadable PDF catalogue  

An exhibition of paintings, sculpture and drawings by Sarah Gillespie, Peter Randall-Page and Anna Gillespie  

A major exhibition to celebrate the new monograph published by Sansom & co  

Paintings and drawings form Paris and New York  

New paintings and drawings by Michael Canning  

Waterhouse & Dodd (the well known Mayfair dealers, founded 1987) are proud to announce that in October 2008 their Cork Street gallery will host a prestigious exhibition of Contemporary Middle Eastern & Arab Art. Routes will be the most extensive selling exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern & Arab art ever held in London, and will showcase a selection of recent works by 15 of the region’s most interesting artists. These will include famous names such as Nja Mahdaoui, Shirin Neshat, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, Farhad Moshiri and Wijdan, the show will also feature some exciting new emerging artists.

For information see: www.artroutes.com  

Waterhouse & Dodd are proud to announce their first contemporary photographic exhibition which will include photographs from her two most recent series of works 'Les Femmes du Maroc' and 'Converging Territories'.

Lalla's art, which often combines Islamic calligraphy with representations of the female body, addresses the complex reality of Arab female identity from the unique perspective of personal experience. In much of her work, she returns to her Moroccan girlhood, looking back on it as an adult woman caught somewhere between past and present, and as an artist, exploring the language in which to "speak" from this uncertain space. Her paintings and current body of work titled, Les Femmes du Maroc appropriate Orientalist imagery from the Western painting tradition, thereby inviting viewers to reconsider the Orientalist mythology. She has worked in numerous media, including painting, video, film, installation, and analog photography. "In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes."

For information see: www.artroutes.com  

Downloadable PDF catalogue  

Angela Palmer’s work represents a meeting point between science and art. ‘Unravelled’ traces the journey of an Egyptian mummy child from the The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford to the scanning theatres of the John Radcliffe hospital where the mummy child underwent a series of CT scans. This intriguing journey through its bandages unearthed a delicate body removed of various organs. These scans then became the source material behind Angela Palmer’s quest to compose a portrait of this child.


Downloadable PDF catalogue  

'Until the end of the line' represents Alan Stewart's first solo exhibition, and is the result of 2 years' work. These are essentially contemplative paintings, but they are defiantly unsentimental. Initially, it might seem that this is merely a tonal connection that links the paintings. This in itself provides some interesting comparisons, not least the rust of the decaying signposts echoing the iron ore embedded in the rocky coastlines. However, what really connects the paintings in this exhibition is an other-worldly quality, one which disturbs routine responses and provokes reminiscences.  

'At The Well of The King of Sundays' is Michael's first solo exhibition in London, and Waterhouse & Dodd's first full exhibition of an artist resident outside of the UK. Michael is also the youngest artist we have given a solo exhibition to, and perhaps that makes his extensive CV listed at the back of the exhibition catalogue all the more remarkable.

Few artists have attracted so much critical praise by the age of 35, and fewer still have achieved museum recognition. Michael has; and not by using the sensationalist imagery that many young artists resort to. His paintings appear at first traditional in composition, and almost Renaissance in execution, but behind this craft lies a strong theoretical understanding which gives the work a necessary contemporary resonance. Decorative painting can ensure commercial success, but art critics and curators require far more substance, and they find that in abundance with Michael's work.

We hope viewers of the exhibition become free from the concept of having to categorise paintings into a genre, or debate the respective merits of the traditional against the progressive, and simply enjoy the paradoxes and essential beauty to be found in Michael's work.
 

Michael Taylor was one of the first artists with whom we made contact when we began our contemporary program; indeed he was present at our first contemporary private view. Despite this, it has taken over two years to put together this exhibition. Michael only produces around four paintings a year, and so to commit to a solo exhibition was a major undertaking for him. Renowned for his commissions for the National Portrait Gallery, his time is divided between portraits and his own private paintings, although notable portrait commissions have been delayed while Michael has prepared for this exhibition. We have been excited to see new paintings slowly appear from Michael’s attic studio, each one conceived with the same meticulous attention to detail yet each individual in content and meaning.

Michael’s last exhibition was almost a decade ago, so it is a rare privilege to stage this show of new work. A past article in Art Review talks of “Teasing ambiguities (which) make Michael Taylor’s beautifully composed figure paintings continually fascinating. They are pictures that need a lot of looking at.” These paintings reveal themselves over time, although the technique is immediately startling. Our thanks go to the private collectors of Michael’s work who have loaned two of the exhibits to our exhibition (Couple with lamp and Woman with jug). These important paintings are pertinent to the main body of the exhibition and add enormously to the viewers’ understanding of Michael’s oeuvre.

We very much hope that you will enjoy looking through these exhibition works but strongly recommend you visit the gallery to appreciate fully the complexity and beauty of the work on show.
 

Our exhibition of 'Abstract & Vorticist Designs 1917-1920' by R A Wilson opens on 1st November.

The exhibition includes not just 50 British modernist paintings from the years 1917-1920 (which, as any collector will tell you, are incredibly rare) but also works by the artist's son, Arthur Wilson, and his grandson, the world-famous installation artist Richard Wilson.
 

In our desire to promote a diverse range of artists with unique qualities, we follow the exhibition of Trevor Bell's work in June with our first solo exhibition of Louise McClary's work, comprising over thirty-five paintings. Many of you will already be familiar with the work from the various group ahows and art fairs we have been involved with in the UK and USA over the last twelve months. Louise is an artist with a very distinctive voice and her paintings are at once contemplative and uplifting, possessing as they do a tremendous initial impact and also a lasting resonance.

Exhibition catalogue (downloadable PDF)  

TREVOR BELL Chris Stephens Senior Curator of Tate Britain London June 2006


“Trevor Bell is an artist of the Sublime. He belongs, that is to say, to a tradition of painters that looks to the awesome scale and power of nature as their primary source of inspiration. This lineage is most commonly associated with the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. One thinks of Richard Wilson’s miniscule humans dwarfed by the massive forms of Snowdonia, of Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary figures at the edge of the sea and of the abyss, and, most of all, of Turner’s representations of nature at its most violent. While remaining a constant presence in the history of art and aesthetics, the Sublime enjoyed a revival in the late 1950s as painters, looking back to Friedrich and Turner, sought to conjure similar emotions not through the representation of natural phenomena but through their imitation in abstraction. Now one thinks of Rothko’s floating planes of colour and Newman’s bold bisected fields. In Britain this 1950s revival of the Sublime was most evident in the work and attitudes of the artists of St Ives: Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron and their younger followers like Trevor Bell.

Bell crashed into the London art scene in 1958 with a sell-out show at Waddington Galleries accompanied by Heron’s assertion that he was the best abstract painter under thirty in Britain. Though distinctly his own, visually his work then looked most indebted to that of Roger Hilton; a good master to have. In spirit, however, they looked to the rough weather out at sea and over the moors and to the ideas of journeying and of infinity that draw one to wide sea views. One painting, Nightfishing, borrowed its title from Bell’s friend W.S. Graham’s meditation on being and nothingness through the metaphor of a sea voyage.

In the forty eight years since then, Bell’s work has gradually and consistently progressed and developed new forms of expression. He is an artist who is continually questioning his methods and their results and exploring the next step forward. Throughout, however, the terrible and beautiful forces of nature and the absolute that informed those earliest works have been a source of inspiration and a model. In the early 1960s he painted shapes that suggested both the forces of the weather and also deep chasms, bringing to mind such natural forms as Gordale Scar, which had already secured a place in the history of the painted Sublime. He would return to such sites in the 1990s with his ‘Zawn’ series, named for the narrow slices cut by the weather into the Cornish cliffs.

In the later sixties, Bell produced elaborately shaped canvases which responded to the work of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella but which partly derived their forms from his passion for sailing and consequent intimate experiences of nature’s forces. In the 1980s he made a series of ‘Rockers’ – single or inter-locked canvases roughly semi-circular so that they appear to rock and so suggest the movement of a boat or, again, of natural forces. The relationship to external sources is almost always allusive rather than literal. It can be visual or it can be experiential, though the distinction is, perhaps, questionable. While living in Florida, Bell painted what he called ‘heatscapes’, brightly and lightly coloured canvases in which the soft-edged forms seem to shimmer as if seen through a heat haze. The most powerful and intriguing were inspired by his watching from afar the moon launches at Cape Canaveral. A source of equally awesome inspiration was found in the Himalayas, where Bell trekked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ancient temples, deep valleys and the stupendous scale of the landscape found its way into the complex shapes of his canvases and the intense forms and colours that inhabited them.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Bell’s canvases took on a new simplicity of form. Having been at times multi-part constructions of great complexity they were now almost – but, crucially, never quite – square, oblong or even circular. Now, the dynamism that had enjoyed a resurgence in Bell’s work following his return to Cornwall in 1996, was achieved more through the painted gesture than the shape of the support. Long sweeping movements of paint sprang up and around the field of play, once again, perhaps, evoking the forces of wind and rain that sweep across Bell’s new home.

Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime seeks to articulate the sensation experienced when faced by the apparently threatening and dangerous forces of nature. In this, key contributors to Sublime experience include power, privation, obscurity, emptiness and greatness of dimension. Never is the Sublime more powerful, more terrible and yet alluring, than when these elements connect to suggest infinity – that which knows no bounds. All of these one might find suggested one way or another, to differing degrees, in all of Trevor Bell’s work. It is, however, in the canvases of the last few of years that he has achieved a degree of emptiness that suggests the infinite and so reaches new heights in the evocation of Sublime forces. It is a considerable achievement in terms of the paintings’ form, to arrive at such an emptiness without creating the illusion of space in the picture. True to Bell’s formal abstract roots, these paintings remain flat fields of colour. Yet they also become like the sea across which Friedrich’s figures gaze, images of infinity that inevitably conjure up intimations of mortality. They are not mournful, however, for that recognition of finality and infinity is a moment of great enlightenment.”
 

Waterhouse & Dodd will be exhibiting 35 original canvases and works on paper in their London Gallery. There will also be a simultaneous exhibition at the Saïd Business School Gallery (Oxford University Business School) 24th June – 8th July where they will be displaying large-scale recent paintings from his colour field series. By offering two exhibitions at the same time, they hope to give the viewing public greater access to the range and varying scale of Bell’s extraordinary painting.

Address: Saïd Business School Gallery, Oxford University, Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HP

A catalogue to accompany both exhibitions with a text by Chris Stephens (Senior Curator, Tate Britain) is available on request and can be downloaded as a PDF file.  

A mixed exhibition featuring the paintings and sculpture of: Peter Archer, Daisy Cook, Trevor Felcey, Sarah Graham, Peter Randall-Page, Julia Sorrell and Sonia Stanyard  

An exhibiton of high quality, yet affordable paintings and sculpture by six British artists: Peter Archer, Louise McClary, Sarah Gillespie, Daisy Cook, Ruth Stage and Deborah Stern.