St Ives, and Elsewhere. Post-War British Painting
The aim of the project is to highlight St Ives artists’ understanding of abstraction in relation to their experience of landscape. It will connect formal and technical innovations worked out by them with the sense of placement – sensitive and acute awarenes of staying at a particular site. Resulting synthetic and processual aspects of paintings seem to be distinctive features of British painting from the 1940s–1960s, entering in an interesting resonance with Polish painting of the same period.
The project will entail revealing a Polish thread in the St Ives artistic milieu’s postwar history – the frequent visits to St Ives, contacts with artists, and the resulting work of Piotr Potworowski. It will also be an occasion to acknowledge artistic achievements of Doreen Heaton-Potworowska, Potworowski’s assistant at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham and his subsequent wife. Their common stay in Poland in the years 1958-1962 was an occasion for transferring artistic ideas developed in the British milieu into the Polish context.
On view in 2025.
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