Between 1958 and 1961, William Crozier produced a series of daring and original landscape paintings. He lived in north Essex at the time and found inspiration in those bleak environs, even as he looked inwards and infused his paintings with existential angst. This exhibition at The Lightbox, Woking, brings together these works for the first time since they were first exhibited in the 1960s. It shows Crozier to be one of the leading artists of his generation in post-war Britain.
Crozier walked a tightrope between representation and abstraction throughout his career. In these paintings of winter fields and atmospheric marshland, conjured in gestural sweeps of pure colour, he developed an original style which reconciled observation with forceful painterly gestures. Along with Howard Hodgkin and Gillian Ayres, Crozier was reacting against the fashionable art inspired by American Abstract Expressionism. His rejection of total abstraction was highly personal and routed in a self-professed European identity. Many works in the exhibition have not been seen in public for a generation and show Crozier's stylistic connections to Peter Lanyon and Pierre Soulages alike.
The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the William Crozier Estate and Piano Nobile. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue.
