William Crozier
New Paintings
8 September – 2 October 2010
The Scottish Gallery
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200
Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Front cover: Elegant Garden 2010 oil on canvas 81 x 101.5 cms
William Crozier in the studio at Chateau La Gonette, Haute Provence 2010
Bill Crozier has reached the grand old age of eighty and there will be celebrations in London, Dublin and Edinburgh. This exhibition includes the fruits of recent studio-time and some new prints made with the Berardinelli studio in Verona. While we are delighted to recognize the achievement of the artist over a productive, professional life going back over sixty years it is so much more important to see new work and celebrate the continuing, creative ferment of one of the greatest colourists and image-makers of post-war British painting. While some of his many honours have come late we can look at new paintings like Night and Haute Provence and see that these laurels are not for resting upon: there are more triumphs to be won. The surfaces crackle with energy while the compositions are as perfectly balanced as a Mondrian. The assurance of his mark-making and bold originality of his palette are undimmed while the generosity with which he has always embraced collaboration is abundantly evident in the Verona suite of carborundum prints. The Scottish Gallery is honoured by its long association with Crozier and delighted to present his latest and most brilliant work.
Guy Peploe
Managing Director, The Scottish Gallery
Foreword
Born in Glasgow in 1930 and raised in the seaside town of Troon in Ayrshire, William Crozier received his art education at the Glasgow School of Art between 1949 and 1953. He spent periods of his early professional life in Paris and Dublin before settling in London where by 1957, he gained a reputation among fellow artists through the early success of his exhibitions of assemblages and paintings at the ICA, the Arthur Tooth and the Drian Galleries, with whom he had a long association. From his earliest exhibitions, Crozier has been concerned with landscape and the natural world.
Throughout his life Crozier has always allied himself and his work consciously with wider European art and culture. In the 1950s and 60s he was part of the artistic and literary worlds of London’s Soho, a close associate of ‘the Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, Roger
Hilton and William Scott, and he was part of the expatriate middle-European intellectual circles in London of the time. In 1963 Crozier spent a year in southern Spain, an experience that was to prove pivotal to his development as an artist, in particular his concerns with the landscape and the painting of the human figure. On his return to the UK, influenced by the experience of visiting Belsen, he began a series of skeleton paintings, which anticipate ‘New Expressionist’ German painting of the 1980s.
Based in London from 1964, Crozier continued to exhibit there and in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin and continental Europe. In common with many senior artists of the 1960s, the artist combined painting with teaching, first at Bath Academy of Art, then at the Central School of Art in London, at the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of
William Crozier
Art where, as Head of the Fine Art Department, he led a distinguished centre for painting based on the European tradition. However in 1987 he relinquished all his teaching commitments to devote himself exclusively to his art.
William Crozier has represented the UK overseas, and has been awarded the Premio Lissone in Milan and the Gold medal for Painting from the Irish Oireachtas. In 1991 the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy curated a mid-career retrospective of his work. He was elected to Aosdána (the body founded by the Irish Government to honour artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts) in 1992 and he is an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Several films have been made about Crozier and his work, notably ‘William Crozier’
by W. Gordon Smith for BBC Scotland in 1970 and the 1993 documentary ‘The Truth about a painter’ directed by Cian O hEigertaigh for RTE. William Crozier’s work features in all major reference works on Scottish and Irish Art. His work is represented in the major public and private collections in the UK and Ireland, as well as in the national galleries of Canada, Poland and Australia and the Museums of Modern Art of Scotland, Ireland and Denmark.
A major monograph ‘William Crozier’ (ed. Crouan, K, with essays by Kennedy, SB and Vann, P) was published in 2007 by Lund Humphries.
Full CV available on request.
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
Web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Published by The Scottish Gallery for the exhibition William Crozier, New Paintings
8 September – 2 October 2010 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/williamcrozier ISBN 978-1-905146-45-1
Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Photography by Katharine Crouan Printed by Stewarts
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