Page 52 - Studio International - September 1966

encircle the compositions, the flat pastel tints, the sinuous
lines. There are aeroplanes and motor cars here that
Pelleas and Melisande might have flown in-the roar of
the exhausts was quite certainly orchestrated by Debussy.
And, amidst all this, it is amusing to note that the figures
are like the little wooden personages who appear in
f
Magritte's work-their gestures have the stif formality of
a vanished age.
Finally, a brusque return to the nineteen-sixties. At the
WADDINGTON GALLERY is a one-man show by Isaac
Witkin, one of the young lions of the New Generation
show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Since then, vVitkin
hasn't been over-exposed, like some of his rivals, and the
work (which has developed meanwhile) looks more im­
pressive because of it. At the ROWAN GALLERY, two sculp­
tors follow one another.Just concluding is a show of work
by Barry Flanagan, the products of an original and
rather disturbing sensibility. Shapes in cloth over plaster
invite the touch, and then repel it-the shapes are like the
shapes you guess at when moving round an unfamiliar
room in total darkness. Cooler, cleaner-consciously
elegant indeed-are a series of new sculptures in fibre­
glass by Garth Evans, which will shortly go on view.
Evans is a very accomplished practitioner in the New
Generation idiom, and, it seems to me, a most intelligent
manipulator of form. The sculpture called Tilt, for
Barry Flanagan instance, is at once softly vegetable and crisply machine­
Aaing j gni aa made, a statement about not-quite-matching units and a
Cloth, plaster
60 X 36 in. statement about nature. Evans, like Philip King, has just
Rowan Gallery a hint of the romantic style, and it seems to me that his
work is all the better for it. Having been kindly but firmly
thrown through the window, poetry returns by the back
door. D

W. H. Auden by Sam Walsh (above) and Pickman's Model, oil
and collage, by Adrian Henri (left) two of the paintings in
the Liverpool Academy at the Walker Art Gallery refe1·red to
in Edward Lucie-Smith's Commentary in the August issue of
Studio !nternaliona!.
ISO