FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 18, 2017
Contact
Telephone
Website
FELIX & SPEAR
Modern British and Contemporary Art
Cameron Amiri
020 8566 1574
info@felixandspear.com
www.felixandspear.com
PETER CLOSSICK: SPIRIT & MATTER
27 April – 1 June 2017
Drinks and meet the artist: Thursday 11 May, 6.30-8.30pm
Ealing, London W5, March 18, 2017 – Felix & Spear Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings
spanning the career of the former London Group president and NEAC member, Peter Clossick.
"Drawing is the key factor in my practise of working from
direct observation. Not as cartoon or photo dependent
cliché but reacting with material on the surface to give
physical presence. It is accumulated experience through
time. All images made from life are based on the abstract
of lines, marks and area, which are my language
limitations in front of the model or motif. The task is to try
and match them to my experience at that moment. Moments
which are in a constant state of change where nothing has
ever been static or fixed but in perpetual motion. It is my
adventure to try and go beyond knowing with no pre-
determined outcome, using paint, charcoal, ink and
pigment stick as matter - channelled through my body and
mind in perseverance for a creative act outside of
limitations, becoming a form of metaphoric reality."
Peter Clossick 2017
Peter Clossick focuses on faces, the single figure, men and women, the nature of physical sensuousness
itself. The models are still, seated or lying; their eyes cast down or even blanked out, while the composition
is enlivened by the physical act of perception. His is the moving and heuristic gaze, the act of discovering
of the world through the exploration of possibilities…. He makes us feel the present, the here and now of
our being in the world, the joy and the anguish of life in moments of heightened sensation. This is never a
simple description of the outer skin of things, but rather a multi-layered, multi-toned articulation of physical
realities…. Walter Sickert’s gritty, sensual Camden Town nudes spring to mind, but now they are
transmuted into an intensely private and philosophical mood. Clossick grew up overlooking Mornington
Crescent and is steeped in the “Bombstream” (Bomberg + Coldstream), Euston Road tradition. Frank
Auerbach and Leon Kossoff’s thick wielding of paint in scenes of London provides a continuity from the
1960s right up to the present. Clossick builds on these predecessors, fixing as they do, that peculiarly
luminous grey London light, and their notion of painting as a relief – as sculpture – as a lump of matter. It
becomes a tactile, structural and eventually abstract object which can hold, to borrow David Bomberg’s
words, “the spirit in the mass”.... Here is a love affair with the human form and the physical properties of
paint on canvas. The marks, swirls, touches, impastos, scumbles, draw us in. We can, in a moment of
extraordinary awareness, be transported out of ourselves. Of course, this is why art touches us and can even
mesmerise us. We can share and explore another’s world and return to our own, secure in the knowledge
that the journey has enriched our view of things.
Corinna Lotz 2016 (excerpts from the essay ‘Peter Clossick’s moving gaze’)
ABOUT PETER CLOSSICK, PPLG NEAC
Peter Clossick studied at Camberwell School of Art and Goldsmiths College during the early 1970s and
has been engaged in professional fine art practice since. He is a member and Past President of The London
Group and a member of The New English Art Club under the Federation of British Artists and exhibits
regularly at the Mall Galleries, showing widely both here and abroad. He has three times been awarded a
prize in the Lynn Painter-Stainers competition, work has been included in the Ruth Borchard and other
public collections and he was shortlisted with a prize for the 2016 Columbia Threadneedle competition.
Clossick has exhibited in the John Moores; R.C.A; Deutsche Bank; Arti et Amicitiae; Art Miami;
Whitechapel Open; South London Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; Festival Hall and RA Summer Shows.
Previous to Fine Art training, he studied Shoe Design at Leicester Polytechnic and won a Royal Society of
Arts Bursary and the Lanctan Cup for design.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Address: Felix & Spear, 71 St Mary’s Road, London W5 5RG
Exhibition Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10.30am – 6.00pm, Saturday 11.00am – 4.00pm
If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Cameron Amiri 020 8566 1574 /
info@felixandspear.com
All images © the artist, courtesy of Felix & Spear, London.
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