Overview
For forty years British artist David Hepher has centred on a single subject, the high-rises of South London, through which he has channelled the diverse currents that have swept the international world of contemporary art. His multivalent work has both celebrated and mourned modernism in modes that are futuristic and nostalgic, utopian and entropic. Flowers Gallery will exhibit a major retrospective of Hepher's work at our Kingsland Road gallery space.
This show coincides with the UK launch of a new monograph written by art critic, author and documentary film-maker Ben Lewis. The publication charts Hepher’s life and work from the 1950s to the present day, tracing a path that begins in an era of the last century that was highly suspicious of figurative painting, through to the recent re-evaluation and rise to prominence of post-war British Art within global art history. Aligning the engagement of his work with the critical discourses surrounding the ‘end of painting’ and conceptual and minimalist strategies throughout the 1960s and 1970s, this book presents Hepher’s oeuvre as a “British realist response to modernism” and a highly theorised engagement with painting. With over 250 colour illustrations, this is the largest book to have been published on Hepher’s practice.
