"The choice of locations for the London Landscapes was, as ever, mainly practical. There is nothing significant to link Gravesend, Green Park, Finchley Road or the Southbank, other than they provided Andrew Gifford a space to work relatively undisturbed and within reach of a base – a friend’s flat, the gallery storeroom, or, the kindly National Theatre – where Gifford could leave paints, dry panels or warm up. The process of painting for him becomes not about hunting for a view, but selecting a viewpoint and a direction that might provide an opportunity to record a particular moment of light as it hits a building or fuses with the sky. As in all his work, the presence of a landmark becomes incidental and entirely secondary to the artist’s over-riding fascination with light and his remarkable ability to select and capture the briefest moment in an oil sketch.

Light alters constantly and effects every element of the painting, so the decisions have to be instantaneous. The shadowless, grey tones of a London street has its own familiar beauty, just as miraculous in its way as the explosion of golden light as the low evening sun finally punctures that ever-present blanket of cloud. The City also conjures up its own second twilight when the dying sunshine fades away not into night, but the nocturnal dawn of traffic, restaurant neons, street lamps and the insistent glow of the office. It is an exquisite drama that unfolds equally across every postcode. Gifford’s project has been to record the City in its simplicity, not as as a series of landmarks but as a landscape, recording London through the single, ever-present element with which we are most deeply familiar." John Martin

Working at various locations across London over the last six months, Andrew Gifford has produced a number of small, open air studies from which a series of large-scale canvases will be presented this August during the Olympic month. Gifford's painting and installations are concerned with the contrasting effects of natural and artifical light and in this exhibition he sets out to record the city in its simplicity through the single element with which Londoners are perhaps most deeply familiar.This is an exhibition not about the topography of London, but about its light.

Andrew Gifford is now recognised as one of the most innovative landscape painters working today. His paintings and light installations have been widely exhibited, including solo public shows at Leeds City Art Gallery (2004), Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh (2001) and Middlesbrough Art Gallery (2000). Collections include the New Art Gallery, Walsall and Chatsworth House and in private collections in Europe, USA and Japan. A monograph on the artist was published in 2005.

John Martin Gallery
38 Albemarle Street, 
London W1S 4JG, United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0)20 7499 1314
Fax +44 (0)20 7493 2842
info@jmlondon.com
www.jmlondon.com

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