Julian Cooper is now regarded as one of the most original and thought provoking mountain painters working today. For this exhibition he has turned his attention to the Lake District’s slate quarry on Honister Crag, and to that icon of Alpine mountaineering , the Eiger, which he visited in the summer of 2003.

The earliest of his mountain landscapes, from the mid 90’s, were huge canvases painted on site at an altitude of 15,000ft in the Peruvian Andes. These were followed four years later, after an expedition to the Himalayas, with a group of semi-abstract paintings that changed the concentration from the Romantic idea of the mountain as image, to the examination of selected areas of the terrain: the mountain as seen and experienced by the climber.

The Honister and Eiger paintings in this exhibition build on what the Himalayan work had started. Made in the studio, they represent the synthesis of small plein air studies, photographs and memory; where the on-site paintings had captured a superficial likeness, these paintings touch a deeper psychological one. In evidence throughout is the awareness of an artist who has been looking closely at mountain and rock formations for many years and who draws equally on abstract and figurative values to develop a wholly contemporary language to convey a sense of awe when confronted by nature’s elemental powers.

A major retrospective at Museo Nazionale Della Montagna in Turin is now programmed to take place in 16 June - 18 Sepember 2005.

A 22-page catalogue with 11 full colour reproductions and a recorded conversation between Julian Cooper and fellow painter Basil Beattie, is available.

read the conversation on-line