View the Exhibition

December sees the opening of the Gallery’s third Winter Journey exhibition curated around Schubert’s "Winterreise", the cycle of 24 songs which has now become an annual event in the Gallery calendar. The theme of the exhibition remains true to the central preoccupation of Winterreise and Wilhelm Müller’s poems: the ideas of wandering through evocative yet desolate landscapes and time, and after the third sun grows pale the organ grinder ends in despair yearning for his loss.

This year’s Winter Journey – spanning several generations and as many moods and styles - brings together  seven artists once again examining the nature of the world they live in and their relationship to it, and like Schubert’s hero they show us that it is a journey that can be painful and yet emotionally fulfilling.

Jeffery Camp and Jeffrey Dennis have an evident love of their environment, but their work is not strictly reliant on landscapes. Here, real places are overlaid with imaginary events that offer a fractured but poetic and dream-like view of the world.

By contrast John Davies, Ken Kiff and Andrea McLean journey into totally imaginary lands. John Davies concentrates on the human figure playing out their dramas in surrealistic landscapes and the late Ken Kiff was a purveyor of the marvellous; a modern-day equivalent to the wandering minstrel of old, telling tales of strange and wonderful places peopled by goblins and demons of the psyche. Andrea McLean on the other hand invents visionary maps to organize pictorially her imaginative view of a world where past and present, fact and myth, the real and the imagined intermingle.

Michael Sandle and Frank Creber offer a glimpse into the condition of man from two different views. Michael Sandle’s drawings are directed uncompromisingly towards the spiritual problems of modern man and Creber records the heroic urban survival in the East End of London undaunted by poverty and the impoverished environment.

 

 

 

** Schubert composed this cycle of 24 songs, based on Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems: "Poems from the posthumous papers of an itenerant horn player" during 1827-8 shortly before his death.

Titles of the songs, translated:

1. Good Night 2. The Weather Vane 3. Frozen Tears 4. Congealing 5. The Lime Tree 6. Water Torrents 7. On the River 8. Looking Back 9. Will-o'-the Wisp 10. Rest 11. Dream of Spring 12. Loneliness

13. The Post 14. The Old Head 15. The Crow 16. Last Hope 17. In the Village 18. Stormy Morning 19. Deception 20. The Signpost 21. The Inn 22. Courage 23. The Other Suns 24. The Organ Grinder