Tate St Ives presents the work of two British artists this spring. An exhibition of the acclaimed British modernist William Scott, who is perhaps best known for his still life paintings, often of the same few elements. In a similar manner contemporary photographer Peter Fraser presents ‘found’ still lives and Peter Fraser a contemporary photographer who has been at the forefront of colour photography as a fine art medium since the early 1980s
To mark the achievements of William Scott, internationally acclaimed modern painter, an important retrospective exhibition opens at Tate St Ives on 26 January. This will be the first major showing of the artist in the UK for over 20 years. February 2013 marks the centenary of the birth of William Scott (1913 – 1989). Across a career spanning six decades, Scott produced an extraordinary body of work that has secured his reputation as one of the leading British painters of his generation. Exhibiting in America and Europe from the early 1950s, Scott is renowned for his powerful handling of paint in his exploration of still life, landscape and nude, and of the unstable boundaries between them.
The exhibition has been created in association with The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire and Ulster Museum,Belfast. Beginning at Tate St Ives with a series of thematic rooms (focusing on Scott’s morphological shifts between genres and his preoccupation with ‘significant forms’) the exhibition will evolve as it travels to The Hepworth Wakefield, before expanding into a survey exhibition at Ulster Museum, Belfast. In collaboration with the William Scott Estate, which is currently finalising a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings (due March 2013), the works will be drawn from major collections across the UK and Ireland. A new book William Scott by Sarah Whitfield will be published by Tate to mark the centenary and exhibition.
Much of Peter Fraser’s work involves an almost obsessive focus on the stuff of the world, the matter and materials that he finds in the everyday The exhibition at Tate St Ives will include works drawn from across 30 years of his career. All of Fraser’s photographs are found still lives, he does not construct his pictures but rather focuses in on the enigmatic objects he finds, revealing the edges, minutae and incidental beauty and strangeness in the visible world. Through this sustained and concentrated focus, he creates highly charged and psychologically compelling images of enormous intensity and resonance. A recurring concern is an interest in the ‘matter’ of the world, of ‘things’ and their status, as well as strong interest in journeys and narrative, at once literal, literary and psychological.
A monograph covering the whole of Fraser’s career to date with an essay by David Chandler, published by Tate St Ives, accompanies the exhibition.