Anthony Green has been painting the reflections of his own domestic life since the mid 1950s with a kind of ‘realism’ that must have left few secrets in the confessional. He has recorded every phase of his life, every nuance of his family relationships, but Anthony Green’s richest vein has been the conjugal. This exhibition is a celebration of the most intimate of these paintings made during the last twenty five years and includes major new works that will be seen for the first time.

With their jaggedly cut out shapes which describe specific places that brim with incident and a narrative force, Green’s paintings are instantly recognisable. Probably more than any other post-war British painter, self-disclosure and humour are the most important elements in the work and in this selection of twenty five or so of the most ribald of Green’s works we are invited to participate in these intimate facets of his nuptial pleasures.

In his own words:

Sex isn’t a sin – our wedding night at the Hotel Florida in Paris was glorious.  Consuming peaches in bed during extremely hot afternoons just around the corner from La Madeleine is part of my little history – which also includes dutch caps, Gauloises, breasts, lips and ‘Revelation’ luggage…..

It was all so lovely that painting the 40th wedding anniversary has seemed pre-ordained.  Furthermore, I now have the courage to paint all the moving parts.  Although I started a priapic self-portrait in 1967, I’ve only just completed the exercise (2006).

This exhibition is a celebration that includes adolescence, the French family doctor’s promiscuous wife, a Silver Wedding drawing complete with wedding trousers and fly buttons – and “in bed” at the Ritz.

Bathrooms are very “Botticelli”.

The pink lounge goes where L Freud has apparently feared to penetrate and my paper dart pays heartfelt tribute to Marcel Duchamp in whose august presence so many have auto-destructed.

I don’t do “angst”, so gaze upon these lovely pictures and feel immortal – if only for a while …

Anthony Green
Little Eversden, Cambridge
2006