Pop-Up Gallery with Garden

Extraordinary show celebrates the distinctive art, humour and insight of a unique English artist.

The Pop-Up Gallery in the beautiful Surrey village of Shere, opens from May 2024 with an exhibition displaying just some of the diverse creative output of the English artist, John Rich - including over 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures.

John Rich’s practice, and his life, was built on a conviction that art matters. For him, to be an artist required technical skill but also it demanded study and understanding of art history and practices in all their variety, and of the ideas, historical circumstances and human experience which underlie them. He aimed to take art forward and importantly, to explore beyond what was popular and what happened to sell.

This distinctive expertise and approach, together with fluctuations in his mental health, helps give his art an eclecticism unconstrained in genre, medium or subject matter.

First time viewers often respond with a quick laugh, followed by a puzzled pause and then an intrigued ‘ohhh’ as they look again. Initially unsettled or amused, they are then placed in a state better able to consider the work afresh. Sometimes the initial humour lies in an allusion to a grand theme in juxtaposition with something seemingly banal, sometimes in a recognisable form, or in the choice of subject matter or how it is treated. In several works, an everyday, ordinary object is elevated to become the focus of our attention, so that we recognise ourselves in it: the individual viewer’s solitary consciousness takes form in the isolated tap, broom or toothbrush.

Visitors to the Pop-Up Gallery in Shere are invited to tell us their own thoughts and feelings in response to his incredibly varied works on show across three floors of the gallery.

The gallery is free and open to the public on frequent weekends from May 2024 with a calendar of dates on the gallery’s website at www.johnrichartwork.co.uk and is also open by appointment for private views. The first open weekend is 4th and 5th of May 2024 from 12noon to 6pm.