Page 53 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Grey and aluminium 1967, 87 x 75 in., one of the
works in Malcolm Hughes' recent exhibition at the
Axiom Gallery

uses canvas stretched over a shaped wooden charming little landscapes in the Euston Road matism of the brush. The colour is bright and
frame. This isn't a new idea; what is new, perhaps, manner, but it's difficult to see that five are cheerful. This kind of painting enjoyed such a
is the degree of complication to be found in some necessarily more eloquent than one. William vast success in the years immediately following the
at least of the pieces. A good many of them seem Brooker, as a colleague has already observed, war that it's hard to be fair to it now, having seen
to be about the sexual impulse. They remind me seems to want to combine the manner of Cold- it so much over-valued. Appel seems to me an
of the much more clearly figurative images stream with that of Morandi. The result is a Expressionist without bite—in which case, why be
created by Richard Lindner, and still more of the series of pictures with a sheer painterly skill which an Expressionist artist at all?
three-dimensional versions of these made in cloth it would be hard not to admire. These tables
by Jan Haworth. Bullmore seems to be showing loaded (but rather sparsely) with objects really do At the LEICESTER GALLERY an exhibition of paint-
some uncertainty of style at the moment; this is, I exist in their own right, and each mark on the ings by the Indian artist Rama Rao has been
suspect, very much a transitional exhibition. canvas has meaning and purpose. If my tone followed by one of work by Michael Wishart.
sounds grudging for all that, it's because all this Rama Rao finds himself in the dilemma which
`Transitional' is not quite the word for William effort seems a little dogged, and tends to leave me seems to face most contemporary Indian artists:
Brooker and Adrian Berg at TOOTH'S, or for Karel untouched and unmoved. of how to retain the Indian heritage while still
Appel at the REDFERN. All three are artists with But so, for that matter, do the histrionics of producing work which is distinctively modern.
an established style of their own. Berg makes Appel, whose current work is still clearly related to His free abstractions draw on the Indian sense of
assemblages of images—his are pictures which you the kind of imagery which he has been using since colour—sharp, clashing pinks of a kind which one
read as much as look at. The images are not 1948, when the Cobra Group was formed. The associates with Indian miniatures. The forms, not
always very original in themselves. A picture figuration relies somewhat on the conventions of always quite convincing or inevitable, also seem
called Spring, Gloucester Gate shows us five very child-drawing; it is also governed by the auto- to owe something to traditional Indian patterns.