Dennis Creffield 1931-2018
Images
Biography
One of the most powerful draughtsmen of the last seventy years, the paintings and drawings of Dennis Creffield combine a fidelity to the subject with immense improvisation to fuse empiricism with a profound spirituality.
Perhaps most famous for his epic drawings of the cathedrals of England and France, the human body has also been a long-standing preoccupation. Creffield's work is in numerous museum collections from Tate Britain to Los Angeles County Museum. James Hyman Gallery was honoured to represent Dennis Creffield for many years and especially proud to have commissioned and staged the marvellous Jerusalem exhibition in 2011. This was one of the largest and most ambitious exhibitions of Creffield's entire career. At the heart of the exhibition was an incredible iconostasis - an extraordinary series of portraits inspired by a life mask of William Blake - that is one of Creffield's greatest achievements.
Works
Exhibitions
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Celebrating 25 Years of James Hyman Gallery
27 Oct - 20 Dec 202427th October 2024 marks twenty five years since the founding of James Hyman Fine Art in 1999. To mark this anniversary we are staging a special online exhibition. Based in St James’s and Mayfair for most of this time, the gallery has specialised in Twentieth Century British Art with a...Read more -
Modern British Art 2022
29 Mar - 31 May 2022Read more -
Special Charity Fundraiser for The Trussell Trust
7 - 30 Dec 2020The Trussell Trust supports a nationwide network of food banks to provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty, and campaigns for change to end the need for food banks in the UK. James Hyman, Gallery Director, said: This year we have presented a series of online fundraising...Read more -
Special Fundraising Sale for the National Health Service
29 Mar - 29 May 2020Unfortunately, NHS Hospital staff, on the front line in the treatment of patients with Covid-19, are still working without the proper PPE (personal protective equipment), and there remains a shortage of testing kits and ventilators. As everyone pulls together I have been thinking what I can do as an art...Read more -
Dennis Creffield
Paintings of Innocence and Experience 18 Sep - 30 Oct 2015Dennis Creffield. Paintings of Innocence and Experience presents paintings spanning seven decades to trace the range of the artist's work from the 1940s, and his days in the classes of David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic, through to more recent paintings. This is a major opportunity to explore the diversity...Read more -
Twentieth Century British Art 2012
6 - 21 Dec 2012Artists whose work is presented include: Frank Auerbach Tony Bevan John Bratby Edward Burra Jake & Dinos Chapman Geoffrey Clarke Prunella Clough John Davies Eric Gill David Hockney Gary Hume Conrow Maddox Robert Medley Paul Noble Hughie O'Donoghue Eduardo Paolozzi Peter Phillips Walter Richard Sickert Jack Smith William Turnbull and...Read more -
Dennis Creffield. Jerusalem
7 Sep - 9 Oct 2011In the extensively illustrated publication that accompanies the exhibition, James Hyman explains the origins of these pictures: 'In May 2007, I paid a visit to Dennis Creffield's studio in Brighton and as we talked over lunch the idea for an exhibition grew. I proposed a commission based on Jerusalem/William Blake...Read more -
Beyond the Human Clay
5 May - 18 Jun 2011In 1976 the great figurative painter and polemicist R.B. Kitaj organized a group exhibition for the Arts Council of Great Britain entitled The Human Clay. To mark the 35th anniversary of Kitaj's seminal exhibition and to celebrate a decade of exhibitions focused on Twentieth Century British figurative art at James...Read more -
A Tribute to Sir Colin St John Wilson
21 Nov - 1 Dec 2007James Hyman is proud to present a personal tribute to Sir Colin St John Wilson, one of Britain's greatest architects and art collectors of the last half-century. The exhibition follows the death of Colin St John Wilson in May this year and coincides with the 10th anniversary of the opening...Read more -
Dennis Creffield. Body and Soul
2 Nov - 1 Dec 2007These drawings not only confirm Creffield's stature as one of the greatest draftsmen at work today but also capture the essence of what he does. Linking these two bodies of work and informing this vision is a sense of shared structures and of connectedness that acknowledges, in William Blake's words,...Read more -
A Century of Drawing
Important modern British works on paper from the Camden Town School to Bridget Riley 2 Jul - 29 Aug 2003Read more
Publications
Events
Art Fairs