William Crozier: Nature into Abstraction

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William Crozier (1930-2011) Figure, 1961 Oil on canvas © The Estate of William Crozier and Piano Nobile

William Crozier (1930-2011) Figure, 1961 Oil on canvas © The Estate of William Crozier and Piano Nobile

This exhibition focuses on a remarkable series of landscape-inspired paintings produced by the Scots/Irish artist William Crozier (1930-2011) from 1959 to 1962. This was a pivotal moment in the artist's work that captured the spirit of the emergent 1960s and established his reputation at the forefront of British art of the time. In Crozier’s response to the natural environment, he developed an innovative vocabulary of abstract gestures and marks, informed by European and American abstract painting. Like an archaeologist, Crozier uncovered ‘the savagery just beneath the surface’ of the natural world, rather than representing its topographical appearance. In Crozier's paintings, the nature observed provides the catalyst for a radical vision that gives us landscapes of dark revelation.