December sees the opening of the Gallery’s fourth 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.

Terry Setch lives close to the sea-shore in South Wales where the beach, with its scenic and metaphoric qualities, has become the backdrop to his sometimes passionate reaction to contemporary events. With titles such as ‘Ice Melt’, ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Arctic Melt’ his strangely moving images reveal an anxiety about the effects of our changing climate.

Henry Kondracki and Michael Broughton take an inward journey that begins and ends with the strangeness of ordinary and familiar objects. For Kondracki it is the streets of Edinburgh where childhood memories hold a deeper meaning whereas Broughton weaves a rich narrative from the most humble subjects in his domestic surroundings.

Paul Hamlyn journeys through landscapes in which real, imagined and received events are interwoven and Paul Gopal-Chowdhury ‘s paintings are about a journey from the reality of the grimy streets of east London to an alternative dream-like space populated with ghosts, demons and other Indian mythological characters.

This year’s Winter Journey again spans several generations and as many moods with the work of five artists who are deeply concerned with 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 both painful and emotionally fulfilling.

 

 

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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