Purdy Hicks Gallery

23/12/2022

We are delighted to announce that Takashi Arai has been shortlisted for The Prix Picket Japan Award.

The Prix Pictet is the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability. Together with the award, The Prix Pictet Japan Award was created to celebrate early to mid-career Japanese photographers whose work carries strong messages on global sustainability. The third cycle of the Prix Pictet Japan award takes the theme of Fire & Water. Photographers were nominated by a global network of nominators and after a rich debate, four jury members arrived at a final shortlist of eight artists, including Takashi Arai. The winner will be announced at the award ceremony on 16th December 2023



Portrait of the artist, © Anton Orlov

06/12/2022

Sandra Kantanen’s new series Herbarium presents familiar and exotic plants with microscopic precision, revealing the intricacy and delicacy of nature’s structures.

30/11/2022

As a student Ralph Fleck had a teacher who insisted that nothing was unworthy of being painted. It is a credo he has stuck with, creating his own painterly language which involves movement between moments of close observation and of objective distance.

Shown here are his paintings of book stacks. Every inch of the surface is important to him and each is painted with the same absorption and intensity. It is vital that the brush marks are both raw and immediate.

24/11/2022

Light Up My Sky .arrowsmith

On view until 10 December

22/11/2022

Memento Civitatem is a new collaborative work by visual artist Alice Maher and book artist Jamie Murphy. It is the first artists’ book to be commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland, and has been specially designed for its display at the Gallery. Maher and Murphy were invited to create an artists’ book in response to the Gallery’s archives of artists who lived through the social and political developments commemorated by Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries.

Originating from Maher’s research into the art, lives and ideals of six Irish artists – Grace Gifford, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Aloysius O’Kelly, William Orpen, Sarah Purser and Jack B. Yeats – Memento Civitatem explores our contemporary relationship to culture, citizenship, imagination and activism. Inspired by the Tarot card, a medium open to diverse and contradictory readings, the book presents twenty-one iconic image cards alongside words and phrases that are open to interpretation.

On view until 17 September 2023

21/11/2022

Two new Italian inspired painting by Pierre Bergian:

‘Roma’ and ‘Hommage à Visconti’ 2022

18/11/2022

SAMUEL FOSSO: The Man with a Thousand Faces

The major retrospective exhibition exhibiting in Neu-Ulm, Germany ends this Sunday 20th November.

16/11/2022

The interaction between colour and form becomes a poetic dance in Kathrin Linkersdorff’s series FAIRIES.

15/11/2022

We are delighted to announce that seven pieces by Diana Matar and their accompanying texts have been acquired by the Imperial War Museum London with the help of the Contemporary Art Society.

Diana Matar's work is concerned with memory. Often spending years on a theme, she attempts to capture the invisible traces of human history. Specifically, she concentrates on power and violence and the question of what role aesthetics might play in their depiction. Time is an integral element in the making of her work, both in the sense that her photographs are often taken at night, where film is subjected to long exposure times, but also in the sense that her work looks to the past and tries to locate its resonance in the present.

Matar’s Evidence series responds to atrocities committed between 1977 and 2011. Landscapes and architectural spaces are presented where human rights violations took place during both the Gaddafi dictatorship and the ensuing Libyan civil war. Here the images stand in as ‘evidence because the acts of violence have gone undocumented or covered up by the regime’. Matar has described Evidence - ‘a response to the enforced disappearance of my father-in-law, a Libyan opposition leader who was taken by the Gaddafi regime in 1990’. Her work is a comment not only on the effects of dictatorship on a nation, but equally on the families and communities left behind.

The Imperial War Museum has over 11 million photographs covering the cause, course and consequences of modern-day conflicts, and so Diana Matar’s photography will serve to enrich this collection.

08/11/2022

Light Up My Sky
.arrowsmith

We are delighted to present new painting by Sue Arrowsmith in an upcoming exhibition, opening Friday 11 November.

07/11/2022

From the series Light of Grace, Schjerfbeck, 2022

04/11/2022

Infanta, Duke (2009)


DRAWINGS 1890 - 2022 ends Saturday 5th November

03/11/2022

Marcia Kure (b. 1970, Kano, Nigeria) studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and currently lives in Princeton, US. As a prominent member of the University of Nigeria-based Nsukka School, known for its combination of lyrical simplicity and socio-political vision, her drawings and photomontage imagine alternative worlds and can be seen as a critical response to the postcolonial existential condition.

02/11/2022

Waqas Kahn’s ‘The Blue Square’ shows in our current exhibition Drawings 1890 - 2022.

Ends Saturday 5th November

23/10/2022

We are delighted and very proud to announce that Samuel Fosso is one of the four artists shortlisted for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and will take part in the prize’s annual exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, opening in March 2023. The winner will be named on 11 May 2023.

Established in 1996, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize identifies and rewards artists and their projects considered to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.

Samuel Fosso was selected for his solo exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, November 2021 – March 2022. The retrospective traced a career of almost 50 years, exploring Fosso’s practice across self portraiture and performative photography, through which he embodies a powerful way of existing in the world and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.



Sent from my iPhone

22/10/2022

Wonderful studio visit .arrowsmith to see the work we will be showing next month. Exhibition opens Friday 11 November.

18/10/2022

New Acquisitions at the Garden Museum London includes Quince, a work from Tessa Traeger’s remarkable series, Voices of the Vivarais.

Working over many years, Tessa Traeger photographed a mountainous area of France near Lyon, known as `The Vivarais’, peopled by communities that continued to practice techniques and traditions related to food and farming. This way of life is now perilously close to extinction.

Long acclaimed for the brilliance and ingenuity of her colour photographs of food, published in Vogue Magazine (1975-1991) Traeger became absorbed by the skills of the farming communities of the Vivarais. The individuals she came to know and admire `put something of themselves into the food, and a precious human quality was passed on’. Through her work Traeger bears witness to a particular vein of knowledge that is passing into history, and photography is her witness.

16/10/2022

Ordinary experiences become extraordinary in the work of .chernysheva_

05/10/2022

WAQAS KAHN’s works on paper take part in the upcoming show ‘Drawings 1990-1992’

Hundred of thousands of pen marks make up Kahn’s incredibly intricate and web-like drawings. For the artist, his work acts like writing and a way of communicating his state of mind; “I wanted to connect with everyone, no matter what language they would speak. That’s why I became an artist”.

(Red Manifestation 2022, archival ink on wasali paper)

03/10/2022

Opening the doors this week (7-29 October) to Drawings and Works on Paper, a collaborative venture combining two exhibitions that have been timed to coincide: British Drawings 1890-1990 at Sotheran’s with and Drawings 1990-2022 . Both shows emphasise the importance of drawing to artists of the last 120 years. Although many of the artists have used myriad other art forms, they have invariably returned to the honesty of drawing, time and time again.
Marcia Kure The Woman with the Pearl Headphones 2022 (detail) collage, pencil and 24 karat gold on watercolour on paper 38 x 30 cm 15 x 11 in

27/09/2022

Gideon Rubin in Conversation with Zelda Cheatle

Thursday 29 September 6.30-8 pm

To celebrate the exhibition Here and Elsewhere (closing 1 October) Gideon Rubin and Zelda Cheatle will be in conversation at 7pm.
Numbers are limited: please RSVP [email protected]

26/09/2022

Detail of ‘Oval (Edios), 2020’
- Anni Leppäla

Included in ‘Here and Elsewhere’
Ends 1 October

20/09/2022

‘Cortado’ oil paintings by Ralph Fleck

15/09/2022

“As portraits, it isn’t my intention to produce any knowledge or ‘insights’ into the person depicted - instead these photographic objects open out a space behind the image surface, thus catalysing new meanings, new associations, new understandings”

- Bettina von Zwehl

12/09/2022

In her 1991 photographic series ‘The Observer and the Observed’, SUSAN DERGES
updated an experiment first performed in 1889. Using a strobe light, the artist broke up a jet of water to produce a standing wave form which, in
the photographs, appears as a series of droplets suspended in space.
Behind the droplets is a seemingly indistinct image of the artist's face which, when viewed from a distance, achieves blurry focus. Close up, the viewer sees the inverted image with much greater clarity, refracted as it
is through the lens of each watery bead.

On view as part of the group exhibition ‘Here and Elsewhere’ - until 1st October.

09/09/2022

Photos from Purdy Hicks Gallery's post

07/09/2022

Gideon Rubin’s beautiful paintings will be including in ‘Here and Elsewhere’ - a group exhibition opening this Friday 9th September.

03/09/2022

‘Here and Elsewhere’ opens on the 9th September

A sneak preview of new works to be included in the exhibition by and

25/08/2022

New photography of the Bird.' Written by Gemma Padley. Published by Hoxton Mini Press

From wild parrots in the streets of Tokyo to prize pigeons outside New York, this exquisite book brings together the world’s best contemporary photography of birds by over 25 artists, including Leila Jeffreys, and asks us to look anew at these mysterious winged creatures in all their complexity and majesty.

Writing of Leila Jeffreys, Gemma Padley observes, ‘Regal and knowing, yet with a playful glint in their eyes, the birds in Australian artist Leila Jeffreys’ photographs are startlingly personable. Stare at them long enough and they might just turn and wink or introduce themselves. Australia and its neighbouring islands have the world’s greatest diversity of avian life, and Leila’s portraits capture many fascinating native species of pigeons and cockatoos’.

24/08/2022

RALPH FLECK’s magnificent book paintings will be included in the upcoming exhibition BIBLIOMANIA at Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders in Gladbach, Germany.

Through art, the group multimedia exhibition explores the history, magic and charisma of books and the world of knowledge and culture they offer.

9 September 2022 - 8 January 2023.

10/08/2022

SUMMER CLOSURE 11 – 18 AUGUST

Purdy Hicks Gallery will be closed from 11 – 18 August, reopening 19 August with the Summer Group Show Exhibition, Painting (to 3 September)



Pat Harris Sunset for Howard 2017 oil on linen 80 x 100 cm

05/08/2022

‘I daguerreotype lilies in Fukushima every summer. They used to bloom gorgeously in Litate village, the worst contaminated place in Fukushima, when I was intently working on the series `Here and There – Tomorrow’s Islands’ from 2011 to 2013. Lilies have become rare to find in the same village recently. I found that this particular species prefers a semi-cultivated environment and always finds a place between rice paddies and hills. A single nuclear disaster completely changes the ecosystem and relationships among humans, animals, plants, and all living things’ (Takashi Arai)

Takashi Arai, from the Daily D type series: Lilies, Litate Village, Fukushima, 18 July 2021. Unique Daguerreotype 6.5 x 6.5 cm

29/07/2022

This week we had a wonderful visit to Ralph Fleck’s studio in Freiburg. It is hard to convey the power of these remarkable paintings but we hope these images will give you some idea.

Ralph Fleck is currently showing work at Purdy Hicks Gallery in the Summer Exhibition, Painting (to 3 September).

24/07/2022

Every inch of a painting’s surface is important to Ralph Fleck and each is painted with the same absorption and intensity. It is vital that the brush marks are both raw and immediate. However intuitive a painting may appear, its journey is rarely haphazard, but part of a process of looking and a continuing dialogue with the material of paint.

RALPH FLECK’s Rough Seas are included in ‘Painting’, Purdy Hicks Gallery Summer Exhibition - until 3rd September.

18/07/2022

Details from Dawn Wedding 1,2 and 3 by Andrzej Jackowski - on show now Summer Exhibition ‘Painting’ until 3 September.

07/07/2022

Our Summer Group Exhibition ‘PAINTING’ opens today from 6 - 8pm.

Including works by RALPH FLECK, PAT HARRIS (featuring here), ANDRZEJ JACKOWSKI and DAVID QUINN, the show will remain on view until the 8th September.

We hope to see you soon!

05/07/2022

We are delighted to be showing new works by RALPH FLECK in our upcoming Painting exhibition: 8 July - 3 September 2022.

Featured here: Iberico Ham 9/X 2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 80 cm

05/07/2022

20/06/2022

We are delighted to announce a new publication by Radius Books: Celine Bodin, ‘The Hunt’.

The Hunt acts as a brief encyclopaedia of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality, its ability to draw connections between portraiture, identity and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterised by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes of their hairstyle. Forming an unusual yet all too recognisable collection of trophies, the series presents the formulas that continue to permeate feminine mythology.

The book features an introductory short fiction story by American writer Kathryn Scanlan.

13/06/2022

Celebrating this sunny season with EEVA KARHU’s ‘En Plein Air Summer’ series.

'When Eeva Karhu walks out of her front door some thirteen kilometres from the centre of Helsinki, she very much looks as if she intends to walk in a straight line. She takes a photograph and heads for the horizon. Her works are full of the horizon, each individual work is the amalgam of 86 different photographs, harvesting light from one moment to the next. The result is not just one place, but an emotional space which she travels through to find the beginning and ending of every day, a passage of time.' (Alistair Hicks)