Martin Holman

Terry Setch is a painter recognised in Britain and abroad as one of the most consistently radical artists of his generation. During a career of over 50 years, he has not ceased to experiment with new materials to achieve the surface interplay of light, colour, space and gesture that propels his picture-making.

       This book is the first comprehensive monograph about this artist to survey his career, his inspirations and intentions, and to illustrate every phase of his working life with full colour plates and photographs never previously published.

       He has constructed three-dimensional objects; incorporated found materials and detritus into huge paintings; mixed oil paint in unorthodox combinations with synthetic wax; used carpet, sailcloth tarpaulin, Styrofoam and polypropylene sheets as supports; and introduced plastics, chalk dust, heat and corrosive fluids into a very tactile process.

       The book looks at the remarkable and compelling landscape of Setch’s ideas and output, from watercolours made after solitary walks on common land as an adolescent to large-scale paintings in dialogue simultan-eously with the fate of painting and of the planet.

       Born in London in 1936, Setch first came to prominence as a member of the short-lived Leicester Group which stood for a pioneering attitude to non-art materials. The group investigated forms of presentation that questioned conventional distinctions between sculpture, painting, design and printmaking. Moving to Cardiff in the mid-1960s, he evolved a highly personal aesthetic that was nonetheless indebted to modernism, especially to Jackson Pollock.

       Before embarking around 1971 on several generations of paintings derived from his dual response to the environment of the south Wales coast and to his artistic inspirations – the work for which he is best known – Setch came to terms with American Pop art through a sometimes ironic approach that filtered advanced styles through domestic interior design and back into his own art.

       The notions of ‘time’ and ‘home’ always have been important creative influences on Setch. Paintings allegorised a threat to the well-being of man and nature from pollution and war, and from the threat of a nuclear catastrophe. His pictorial language relied on metaphor, gesture and surface to expand the significance of an image beyond its own particular moment.

       His work has never ceased to confound the standard prejudice for ‘good taste’ and ‘high’ against ‘low’ art. The volatility in his technique embodies the unpre-dictable flux of material, imagery and interpretation.

160 pages with 75 colour plates and 78 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 978-1-84822-023-2 Hardbound £30.00

Martin Holman is a writer on modern and contemporary art and an exhibition organiser. He is also the author of Graham Crowley, published in July 2009 by Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass. Michael Sandle RA is a sculptor. Paul Greenhalgh is director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The book has been designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio.

Lund Humphries

in association with Broken Glass

www.lundhumphries.com   www.brokenglassbooks.com

Orders to www.lundhumphries.com

Graham Crowley has occupied a particular position in the development of British painting since the mid-1970s, a decade when the fashionable view was to regard painting as ‘dead’. This book is the first survey to follow this artist through his career and the times in politics and culture that helped to shape it.

His independence from groups or styles, and his rejection of the modernist shibboleths of originality and integrity, are revealed as the strength behind his commitment to making memorable imagery, Inspirations have ranged from the aesthetic of Cubism and Léger’s harmonisations of man, nature and machinery to the cartoon Krazy Kat, stop-frame animation and the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard.

Crowley has looked critically at his medium and its history, and sceptically at the art world and its changing enthusiasms. His independence has permitted a quick-witted ‘stylistic infidelity’ that has taken him from non-figurative compositions to bucolic Irish landscapes; from interiors terrorised by animated household appliances to his reclamation of the down-trodden genre of flower painting; and from painting with a trowel to mastery of working with tinted glazes.

This book traces the common features that hold together a practice prone to visual opposites and recalls the original critical reception for work that presented new, sustainable and home-grown possibilities for British painting at the dawn of the postmodern era of the ‘new image’. As an artist and teacher, Crowley has informed the art of others around him through example.

Crowley was born in Romford, Essex, in 1950. He studied in London at St Martin’s School of Art (1968-72) and the Royal College of Art (1972-5). Since his first solo exhibition in London in 1972 he has had important one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1983) and the ICA, London (1984). He has held important teaching posts, most recently as Professor of Painting at the RCA, and has participated in eight John Moores exhibitions, winning joint second prize in 1987 and 2006. He is represented in several public collections.

124 pages with 61 colour plates and 22 illustrations, 295 x 245 mm. ISBN 978-1-84822-024-9 Hardbound £30.00

Martin Holman is a writer on modern and contemporary art and an exhibition organiser. He is also the author of Terry Setch, published in 2009 by Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass. The book has been designed by David Bloomfield Design, London, and printed by Cantz, Germany.