David Tremlett - Ikon

David Tremlett: 3 Drawing Rooms is at Ikon until 21 April 2014.
David Tremlett has been on and off my radar since the 1970s. I was first aware of him as a Conceptual Artist whose Spring Recordings (1972) comprised a shelf of 81 cassette tape recordings of sounds (mostly wind and birdsong) heard in each of the counties of England, Scotland and Wales.

David Tremlett, Spring Recordings, 1972 (Tate Britain)

20 years later(1992) he was nominated for the Turner Prize - however, alongside Damien Hirst, Alison Wilding and, the surprise winner, Grenville Davey, he was a rank outsider. But his poetic, abstract, pastel wall drawings and fragmentary texts, derived from the locations of his extensive travels, were beautiful.

David Tremlett, Portuguese Wall Drawings (1), 1992

In 2011 his Drawing for Free Thinking was installed on the Manton stairwell at Tate Britain. (Watch a video of its installation.)

David Tremlett, Drawing for Free Thinking, (Tate Britain), 2011

Now he is showing spectacular wall drawings at Ikon. Three rooms are are given over to his geometric abstractions executed in intense pastel pigment, graphite and varnish, and thick, black graphite grease. Gorgeous.
Watch a time-lapse video of the installation - which took more than 2 weeks to complete.