The directors of Art Space Gallery are delighted to present this highly-focused survey of the work of Jeffery Camp. It comprises paintings from four decades, including a magnificent new diamond-shaped picture of particularly brilliant lyricism, and some of the delightful recent asymmetrical vignette paintings, which Art Forum (December 2001) enthusiastically described as 'fresh and loose, informed by an irreverent eye for the distinctions between penetrating observation and glamorising cliché…surprisingly of the moment'. There will also be a small group of Camp's rarely seen sculptures.

Jeffery Camp is the art world's best-kept secret. A painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor, for more than half-a-century he has produced work of outstanding quality which features in both public and private collections across the country. He is an author of distinction, whose immensely popular books Draw (1981) and Paint (1996), have taken home-based art instruction to new heights. But Camp's innate modesty has in some way worked against him: the opposite of a self-promoter, he is not the household name he should be. As Craigie Aitchison says: 'Jeffery is the most underrated painter around'.

Born in Suffolk in 1923, Camp studied first at Lowestoft and Ipswich Schools of Art before moving to Edinburgh College of Art, where he was a pupil of William Gillies. That thorough early training has stood him in good stead. Drawing has always been central to his practise, and he continues to draw from life in the studio, and to make studies of people and places on his travels to the south coast and around London. His principal subject is figures in landscape, whether lovers on a cliff top against a light-filled sea, or happy idlers in a daffodil park. The paintings are distinguished by a rare sensitivity of touch - the characteristic Camp dab - which deploys colour and form with teasing exactness. It is no exaggeration to say that his paintings are explosive in their subtlety.

Art Space Gallery has dedicated this exhibition to showing a representative selection of Camp's paintings from the 1970's to the present day, in the hope that it will foster a proper understanding of his place in British art. There are signs that this is underway in a time of welcome reassessment of the strong tradition of British figuration, and in the wake of supportive media comment, the Tate Gallery has acquired another major Camp painting. In the absence of the museum retrospective he so patently deserves, Art Space Gallery is proud to present this wide-ranging selection of exceptional works by so noted an artist.