Bryan Wynter
The gallery regularly handles, acquires and advises on works by Bryan Wynter. For more information or the availability of work, please contact the gallery.
Bryan Wynter (1915 - 1975)
Bryan Wynter studied first at Westminster School of Art in London from 1937 to 1938, then at London's Slade School of Art from 1938 to 1940. During World War II, he registered as a conscientious objector and worked in a lab testing animals. In 1945 he settled in Zennor near St Ives in Cornwall, where his close friend Patrick Heron was among his immediate neighbours. In 1947 he co-founded the Crypt group with the goal of exhibiting the work of modern artists who were given only peripheral coverage in the St Ives Society exhibitions. He taught at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham from 1951 to 1955. From 1954 he exhibited with the London Group and from 1949 to 1958 with the Penwith Society in St Ives.
At the start of his career, Wynter's work was heavily influenced by Surrealism. In the early fifties, Wynter took up a position at Bath Academy where colleagues such as William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Adrian Heath and Kenneth Armitage brought European developments to his attention, and their influence can be felt in his subsequent still-lifes and landscapes.In 1956 Wynter spent some time in London where he encountered the work of the Abstract Expressionists at the Modern Art in the United States exhibition at the Tate Gallery. In both a Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist vein, Wynter attempted to unleash the subconscious in his painting through the influence of the then legal drug, mescaline.
In 1965 Wynter began a series of paintings based on water. Abandoning the muted tonality of his previous work, reflection and refraction were evoked through bold, psychedelic colours and large gestural strokes evoked the meandering of water. A symbol for new life and spiritual renewal, these later water paintings were the culmination of Wynter's attempt to reconcile nature and the human spirit.
Text Source: Benezit Dictionary of Artists
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Abstract Painting in Britain
1960–65 19 Sep - 6 Dec 2024A parallel presentation to Ben Nicholson: Defining Works 1929-1954, the exhibition features abstract paintings made in Britain between 1960 and 1965. Whereas Nicholson’s work was often infused with constructivist precision...Read more -
Defining British Art
1910 - 2000 17 May - 23 Jul 2021 Piano NobileThis exhibition reviewed the major creative outbursts in twentieth-century Britain, with paintings, sculptures, ceramics and textiles made by four generations of pioneering artists – from Sickert at the fin de...Read more -
Masterpiece
Online Viewing Room 22 - 28 Jun 2020Highlights from our online display included work by Ben and Winifred Nicholson, William Turnbull, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, William Crozier, David Bomberg, Lucian Freud and Barbara Hepworth . Also on...Read more -
British Art Fair
Saatchi Gallery 20 - 23 Sep 2018 Art FairPiano Nobile presented a selection of Post-War and Modern British art, including works by Craigie Aitchison, Kenneth Armitage, David Bomberg, Peter Coker, William Crozier, Leslie Marr, Leon Kossoff, Paul Nash,...Read more -
Modern British Masters (III)
Selected Highlights 29 May - 20 Jun 2018 Piano NobileContinuing a series of exhibitions on the theme, Piano Nobile presented a display of Modern British Masters. Stretching from the birth of modern art at the beginning of the twentieth...Read more
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Collectors' Focus: Post-war British Abstraction
Apollo October 7, 2024Though less popular abroad than it once was, British art of the 1940s and ’50s is still highly sought after at home, writes Emma Crichton-Miller....Read more -
InSight No. 51
Bryan Wynter | Maremma January 6, 2021Though Cornwall was a defining part of his work and his lifestyle, it was not the limit of Bryan Wynter’s existence. The brilliant colouring and...Read more -
InSight No. 11
Bryan Wynter | Wolf Country May 5, 2020In a recent contribution to The Guardian, Simon Armitage said he has been using the current period of isolation to read some poetry by W.S....Read more