We are delighted to be presenting a survey of prints and paintings that spans a 20 year period of Jeremy Gardiner’s career. It has been eight years since Jeremy’s solo presentation of work, ‘A Panoramic View’ at Pallant House Gallery. While he embarks on a study of the Sussex coast for the first time it seems timely to welcome him back to Chichester and have the opportunity to share his journey so far. Jeremy has had an illustrious career, with work in numerous important British Collections and Museums. A number of essays have been written over the years, by important critics and collectors alike. In order to summarise, without diminishing, the importance of the bodies of work represented here, we look back at what some of these writers have observed.
2013 saw the publication of Jeremy Gardiner’s monograph, The Art of Jeremy Gardiner, Unfolding Landscape. Art critic Wendy Baron, who first encountered Gardiner’s work in 1983 at the Royal College of Art (RCA) graduate show when she acquired his work in her role as Director of the Government Art Collection, writes in the foreword that Jeremy and his work while belonging to the strong and enduring tradition of English landscape painting, maintain a vision and sensibility that is unique; “The abstracted reliefs of Nicholson, the dance of transparent organic shapes of Tunnard, the metaphysical preoccupations of Nash, the ragged forms and scumbled surfaces of Lanyon, have informed and enriched, but never dictated, Gardiner’s personal language.”
In this exhibition we get to witness the development of that personal language in both prints and paintings made over twenty years, featuring places of great personal importance to Gardiner, including Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Gardiner says “My work reflects a deep and long-term interest with the geology of landscape and how it is shaped by the forces of nature and by unfolding the landscape through my painting I am inviting the viewer to reflect on their own transient relationship with the physical world.”
Gardiner’s fascination with the Dorset coast started as a boy.....
[Extract from catalogue essay]
