Basil Beattie: Promises, Promises - Jerwood Gallery

Basil Beattie, Ascent, 2012

Basil Beattie: Promises, Promises is at the Jerwood Gallery until 8 January 2014.
Basil Beattie is one of the UK's great abstract painters; although his work is in the Tate collection he is not as well known as he deserves. His large, muscular paintings typically feature motifs suggestive of stairs, ziggurats and tunnels rendered in earthy colours. Beattie belongs to the generation of British artists who were directly influenced by the first major London shows of Abstract Expressionism - notably The New American Painting (Tate Gallery, 1959), Mark Rothko (Whitechapel Gallery, 1961) and Philip Guston (Whitechapel, 1963); coinciding with, and complementing, Beattie's show at the Jerwood is a display of work by Guston.
Read a review by John Bunker at Abstract Critical, and watch Beattie in conversation with critic Mel Gooding.

Basil Beattie, Days Begin and End Here, 2013

Basil Beattie, Step Up On, 2013

Basil Beattie, Top Up, 2013

Basil Beattie, That Irresistible Climb II, 2013

Basil Beattie, Above and Below.

Basil Beattie (right) with Mel Gooding hanging the exhibition in the Jerwood Gallery

Philip Guston, Pile Up, 1981

Ha Ha What Does This Represent? - Standpoint

Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America (detail), 1946

A detail from Ad Reinhardt's 1946 drawing, How to Look at Modern Art in America, provides the title for an exhibition of contemporary abstract painting at the Standpoint Gallery until 31 March: Ha Ha What Does This Represent? 

Exhibiting artists are:

Andrew Bick (lecturer on the MA Fine Art course at the University of Gloucestershire), Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs, Katrina Blannin, Hazel Chalk, Ben Cove, Stewart Geddes, Dan Hays, Vanessa Jackson, Roger Kelly, Caroline List, Gina Medcalf, Alex Gene Morrison, Carol Robertson, James Ryan, Francesca Simon, Daniel Sturgis and Trevor Sutton.

The exhibition is sponsored by abstract critical - see article by David Ryan.

NB Selected illustrations below are representative of the artists' work but are not necessarilly works included in the exhibition.

Andrew Bick, OGV [Double Spider] Dirty B, 2009

Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings, The Unseen, 2010

Katrina Blannin, Ultrapolation, 2009

Ben Cove, Crosses and Quadrangles, 2011

Alex Gene Morrison, Vanish, 2010

Carol Robertson, Starstream, 2011

Daniel Sturgis, Living Well, 2007

Trevor Sutton, Japanese Folk Song, 2011