Bryan Wynter

Waddington Galleries, London
Charles Lienhard Galleries, Zurich
Waddington Galleries, London

Iceland, Reykjavik National Museum, Some aspects of Contemporary British Painting, June 1963, with British Council tour to Canada, Denmark, Belgrade, Skopje, Zagreb, Cairo, Alexandria and Gibraltar;
Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Bryan Wynter, January 1962, no. 10, illustrated in the catalogue, p.16.

The canvas is in good original condition. The paint surface is in good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a simple wooden rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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I think of my paintings as...something that generates imagery rather than contains it...continually unfolding different aspects of themselves, ambiguous and paradoxical paintings with no main 'theme' from which the spectator may, by participation, extract his own images. (Bryan Wynter, 'Statement' in Statements: A Review of British Abstract Art in 1956, ICA, London, 1957).

The present work dates from a period when Wynter was beginning to move away from the more obviously landscape-inspired abstract manner which he had developed during the later 1950s. Often of a physically imposing size, these works use a very distinctive technique to build up dense overlapping layers of paint which disturb the picture surface whilst at the same time creating a sense of depth, of images continually overlaid and obscuring their predecessors whilst hinting at their own forms. Indeed, they seem to perfectly illustrate the words of Patrick Heron,

the secret of good painting... lies in its adjustment of... the illusion, indeed the sensation, of depth, and... the physical reality of the picture surface (Patrick Heron, Space in Colour, introduction to exhibition catalogue, Hanover Gallery, London, 1953).

However, the sheer bravura of the mark-making inherent in Wynter's painting of the late 1950s inevitably led to comparisons with the contemporary American artists whose work, shown at the Tate Gallery in 1956, was now available for first hand inspection by the British. The gestural 'white writing' paintings of Mark Tobey, first developed at Dartington Hall in the 1930s, held obvious similarities but Wynter's work, with its vastly increased scale was perhaps superficially more akin to European artists as varied as Georges Mathieu or Jules Bissier. However, Wynter's wide-ranging interests mean that the paintings combine elements of philosophical considerations of time and memory with a physical involvement with the experience of natural phenomena and growth.