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William Crozier: Nature into Abstraction

Past exhibition
14 February - 22 March 2024 Piano Nobile
  • Summary
  • Works
  • Media
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Summary
William Crozier, Nature into Abstraction

Between 1958 and 1961, William Crozier (1930—2011) was making paintings inspired by his encounters with landscape. The results were not ‘landscapes’, ‘cityscapes’ or even ‘pictures’ but freeform expressions of his subjective viewpoint. He explained in 1958: ‘[painting] is seeing with an eye preset in peculiar focus so that the painter is not seeing but re-inventing, making the apple or the landscape in the image of his own disappointment or eccentricity.’ Crozier was preoccupied by the cold war era’s insecurities, and his paintings of this period register a collective memory of Nazi extermination camps and the imminent threat of nuclear war.

 

Around 1960, the emergence of a skeletal figure in Crozier’s paintings reiterated his concern with mortality. It became a leitmotif of his work over the next decade. In 1958 he claimed to be uninterested by ‘the full-blown luxuriance of a grander nature’, preferring ‘the dull, repetitive life and death of nature’. Later in 1979, he described these paintings as ‘figures in a situation of stress and dilemma’. He went on, ‘it was my intention to extend the state of mind of the [skeletal] person into a depiction of the landscape.’

 

Despite titular references to locations in Ayrshire, Essex and London, Crozier’s abstract idiom precluded the depiction of recognisable places. The visual language of his paintings in these years—organic round-edged forms, jagged streaks, impenetrable black armatures—is an original Anglophone variety of painterly abstraction, akin to the action painting of Jackson Pollock and the tachisme of Paris-based artists such as Roger Bissière, Alfred Manessier and Henri Michaux. In these paintings Crozier conceived an art that was profound and genuine, and they reflect the intense personality of a talented young artist plotting his path through a fast changing world.

 

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

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Works
  • William Crozier, Dried Lake, Essex, 1959
    William Crozier, Dried Lake, Essex, 1959
  • William Crozier, Landscape Wivenhoe, 1960
    William Crozier, Landscape Wivenhoe, 1960
  • William Crozier, Ayrshire Landscape, 1960
    William Crozier, Ayrshire Landscape, 1960
  • William Crozier, Untitled , 1960 c.
    William Crozier, Untitled , 1960 c.
  • William Crozier, Untitled (Landscape), 1960 c.
    William Crozier, Untitled (Landscape), 1960 c.
  • William Crozier, Untitled, 1960
    William Crozier, Untitled, 1960
  • William Crozier, Untitled, 1960-61
    William Crozier, Untitled, 1960-61
  • William Crozier, Figure, 1961
    William Crozier, Figure, 1961
  • William Crozier, Ennis, 1962
    William Crozier, Ennis, 1962
Media
Publications
  • William Crozier

    William Crozier

    Nature into Abstraction 2022
    Softback
    Publisher: Piano Nobile
    ISBN: 978-1-901192-61-2
    Dimensions: 28 x 24cm
    Read more
Events
  • Thomas Marks & Katharine Crouan

    Thomas Marks & Katharine Crouan

    Gallery Talk 5 Mar 2024
    The talk considers Crozier's paintings from 1958-62 - which are the focus of the current exhibition at the gallery, open until 22 March 2024 - and how they relate to his later works and the wider art historical context of post-war British art. Thomas Marks is a leading writer and art critic. He was editor of Apollo from 2013-21 and has contributed to numerous publications, among them Prospect, Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement. Marks has written and lectured widely on historical and contemporary art, and his essay 'Cold...
    Read more
Installation Views
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Press
  • William Crozier | Nature into Abstraction

    William Crozier | Nature into Abstraction

    artdaily.com February 1, 2024
    Artdaily.com features Piano Nobile's William Crozier | Nature into Abstraction exhibition.
    Read more
  • Top 5 Theatre Show & Art Exhibition Picks

    Top 5 Theatre Show & Art Exhibition Picks

    Culture Calling February 1, 2024
    Culture Calling highlights Piano Nobile's William Crozier | Nature into Abstraction exhibition as one of their Top 5 Art & Theatre Exhibitions to visit.
    Read more

Related artist

  • William Crozier

    William Crozier

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