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Visual Arts

Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, Courtauld Gallery ★★★★★

15 Oct 15 – 17 Jan 16, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Fly over the stormy seas of Cornwall's coast with thrilling Peter Lanyon glider paintings at the Courtauld Gallery exhibition

By CW Contributor on 14/10/2015

1 CW reader is interested
Peter Lanyon artist, Glide Path, 1964, Oil and plastic on canvas, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Courtauld Gallery London
Peter Lanyon artist, Glide Path, 1964, Oil and plastic on canvas, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Courtauld Gallery London
Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, Courtauld Gallery 4 Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, Courtauld Gallery Ali Godwin
Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon is one of Britain’s most important Post-War artists, but curiously he has never become a household name. This is probably because of his untimely early death in 1964 after a gliding accident.
Ironically, it was Lanyon's love of gliding that prompted some of his most radical work. Combining multiple perspectives over air, sea and land along the coast of his native Cornwall in his compositions, Lanyon essentially reinvented the tradition of landscape painting. Now, the Courtauld Gallery stages the first ever exhibition devoted entirely to the artist’s gliding paintings - one that fans of modernism will adore.


St Ives
After returning from World War II in 1945, Lanyon established himself as part of the St Ives' Penrith Society, led by superstar artist couple Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Lanyon, who was a generation younger than Nicholson and Hepworth, was uncomfortable at the way the society insisted its members should declare themselves either abstract or representational. He reacted against definition and sought to develop his own visual language that captured the rugged Cornish landscape which he loved.


Painting and Style
When Lanyon began gliding seriously in 1959, he attempted to incorporate the fascinating juxtaposition of the human body with the windswept cliffs and sea into his landscape paintings. His work, influenced in part by Abstract Expressionism, adopted a fluidity that was emboldened by the swirling movements and currents which propelled him through the air.


Soaring Flight
This Courtauld exhibition captures the soaring freedom of Lanyon's finest work, and gives the gliding paintings their long awaited moment in the spotlight. There is a real sense of dynamism in these works. Capturing the energy and unpredictability of a glider in motion, they offer the viewer a visceral thrill. Landscape and seascape become entangled in meshes of colour. Set alongside these stunning paintings are a series of sculptures: innovative abstract models which further explore the perspectival insights offered by flight.


The curation is careful and illuminating, drawing out the relations between flight, emotion, and eroticism. It is a wonderful exhibition, and one which brings to light an unduly neglected body of work.


What Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, Courtauld Gallery
Where Courtauld Gallery, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN | MAP
Nearest tube Charing Cross (underground)
When 15 Oct 15 – 17 Jan 16, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Price £8.50* (concessions available)
Website Click here for more details



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  • Did you know?

    Peter Lanyon, according to St Ives legend, used to relieve himself against the wall of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth’s house every time he passed it along the coastal path, in the hope that it would cause it to fall down. Lanyon, who was the only Cornish member of the Penrith Society, was apparently at loggerheads with the older artists over what he felt were their controlling ways.

What members say

    Cascading abstract works that deserve more of the spotlight and arranged in a beautiful way in one of my favourite small museums

    Alice Godwin

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Courtauld Gallery

British artists

Peter Lanyon

Cornwall

exhibition

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