Peter Howson "Redemption"

Flowers

poster for Peter Howson "Redemption"

This event has ended.

Flowers presents an exhibition of new paintings by the Scottish painter Peter Howson. The art of Peter Howson is deeply ambitious in thought and deed. He deals passionately with profound personal, social and spiritual
themes, using masterly technique to accentuate the positive, exaggerating line and colour, darkness and light, clarity and ambiguity. This is figurative, narrative art in the grand tradition. – Robert Heller, London 2008

Peter Howson has established a formidable reputation as one of his generation’s leading figurative painters. Many of his paintings derive inspiration from the streets of Glasgow, where he was raised. He is renowned for his penetrating insight into the human condition, and his heroic portrayals of the mighty and meek.

His paintings are not academic or didactic in the style of history painting, but the sublimation of revelatory personal narratives. Religious overtures are proceeded by confession, as intimate details of the artist’s familial and spiritual relationships punctuate the parables of his urban imagination.

Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his life and work. Through this spiritual guidance the artist emerged from inner crisis. The dramatic and dynamic paintings of Hades, which make up the majority this exhibition, depict the struggle to find hope in the dark recesses of existence. They reflect the suffering of a modern war-torn and technologically obsessed world, yet a sense of salvation can be found within. Paying homage to Bosch and Brueghel, Howson crowds his canvases with figures of various shapes and sizes, including many familiar echoes from his previous works, writhing in agony and praying for redemption. This deliverance often appears as a radiant figure symbolizing the painter’s daughter Lucie, another major factor in his road to recovery. In the painting Outcast Howson has used impastos to render a tranquil Christ, surrounded by a group of pariahs in search of atonement. This image could be deemed disturbing for many, however as with a
good deal of Howson’s paintings there is a question here as to whom is the real outsider.

Media

Schedule

from March 30, 2012 to May 05, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-03-29 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Peter Howson

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