Varda Caivano in Permeable Edge at University of Chichester

19 October – 4 December 2016

In his contribution to the publication ‘Unit One’ (1934) the British artist Paul Nash asked if England had a national character?

Indeed we could go further and ask has the English landscape formed a national artistic sensibility?

British Modernism can seem modest and intellectually discreet, polite even, when compared with American and European counterparts. It may not have the swagger and self-assurance, but does this lessen its value?

What, if anything, is specific to England as an island culture? And where has this permeated the work of contemporary British painting?

Permeable Edge explores these questions through eighty years of British painting. It looks to those small, but not insignificant, conversations that artists have across generations and changing contexts.

From Paul Nash’s watercolour Hampstead Gardens Under Snow, to the explorations in abstraction by Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and William Gear.

The exhibition culminates by looking at how and where this overlaps, in the work of contemporary British painters, including Phoebe Unwin and the artist duo Biggs and Collings.

Organised through the Fine Art Department and curated by Matthew Burrows Visiting Fellow at the University of Chichester, Permeable Edge continues the series of research exhibitions and symposia which have focused on the relationship between contemporary art and the work of British Modernist painters who feature prominently in the Bishop Otter Art Collection at the University. 

Image: Varda Caivano, Untitled, 2007