Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Earth, Wind & Fire

Exhibition: 10th March - 6th May, 2023

Preview: Friday 10th March, 5-7.30pm

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Earth Series II, 2002, Screenprint, 58 x 76cm

Gallagher & Turner are delighted to show a selection of original prints and artworks, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (b. Fife, Scotland, 1912 – 2004), one of Britain’s most significant modern artists. The exhibition runs alongside the Hatton Gallery’s major retrospective, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Paths to Abstraction, and is presented in partnership with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.

Barns-Graham’s career coincides with the period in which British art received international significance. From a small town in Cornwall, St. Ives, Barns-Graham played a key role in the development of modern abstract art alongside avant-garde artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo.

Embracing keen observation and experimentation, her work evolved from depictions of landscapes, towns, and geological formations, to striking abstract paintings and prints. These playfully explore colour, mark, form and composition, whilst also relating to natural elements, such as Earth, Wind & Fire. Informed by her condition of synaesthesia, Barns-Graham was attempting to express ‘a total experience’[1] of these elements. This included the raw emotions that she felt existed within and under the landscape structures, which she saw clearly in colour.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sunghrie II, 2001, Screenprint, 58 x 76cm

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, White Circle Series III, 2006, Screenprint, 58 x 76cm

Although Barns-Graham had made the occasional etching and linocut, it was screenprints made with Kip Gresham (Curwen Studio) in 1991 that can be seen as the true start of her life as a printmaker. Then in 1998 Barns-Graham met Carol Roberson and Robert Adam of Graal Press. Developing an instant rapport with Robertson, together they established a collaborative printing process using pioneering water-based inks. Barns-Grahams’ acute sense of colour and colour relationships pushed the medium to its extremes, sometimes using fifteen layers of colour to achieve the right tone. There is, Robertson says, always a perfect balance of colours, with each one having a definite effect on mood.[2]

In her last decade, while in her eighties, Barns-Graham produced an astonishing number of prints. For her, making prints was a liberating experience, one in which she could play with screens as ‘slow paintings’[3] to create complete series of images. New ideas sprang constantly from these variations.

With Barns-Graham’s individual brush marks captured on acetate, they made prints that are truly an embodiment of the artist’s painting style. She came to move so swiftly, outpacing the printers with whom she collaborated, that several 2003 editions were unsigned at the time of her death while other images remained unprinted. These latter prints, all strictly mapped by the artist, came to be editioned posthumously to enable the completion of the publication ‘The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : A Complete Catalogue’ (Lund Humphries, 2007) by Dr Ann Gunn.

Alongside a wonderful selection of prints from Earth Series, Wind Dance, Water Dance, Sunghrie, White Circle, and others, available for sale, we are proud to have two original works giving a glimpse into Barns-Graham’s drawing and painting in the 90s.

[1] WBG letter to Tate Gallery, 1965

[2] Lynne Green, W. Barns-Graham a studio life, (London, Lund Humphries, 2018)

[3] WBG comments, recorded by Mullens, letter to author, 20.4.1998

WORK FOR SALE

Please note: Further copies can be sourced and framed to order. Please contact us for more information.

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