Following the success of Robert Medley A Centenary Tribute in 2005, James Hyman Gallery is proud to present our second exhibition of works by Robert Medley.
The exhibition will include important loans from Private Collections as well as works for sale from the Estate of the Artist.
Throughout his life Robert Medley developed his imagery by building on what he learnt from studying the art of the past. As a young man, visiting the Louvre was a formative influence and from then until old age, Medley drew incessantly from the art of the past and used these studies as the basis for imaginative compositions of his own.
The exhibition demonstrates the range of Medley's response, from an intimate transcription of a Descent from the Cross by Rubens to a magisterial Pieta in which the composition is very much the artist's own as he attempts to emulate the power of the Old Masters that he most admired.
At the centre of the exhibition will be Medley's three great late self portraits. In these full-frontal standing nudes, inspired by the pose of Watteau's Gilles, Medley by now an old man confronts his own mortality. These three paintings are exhibited together for the first time. We are grateful to their owners for allowing them to be borrowed for this exhibition.
The exhibition will also include a selection of works on paper from the Artist's Estate. These range from Medley's celebrated studies of the Antique Room at the Slade to gouaches based on favourite paintings.
Robert Medley After the Old Masters comes at a timely moment in which Leon Kossoff's powerful yet intimate response to the art of the past is on show at the National Gallery in London, while in Edinburgh the National Portrait Gallery is about to stage an exhibition of Naked Portraits.
ESTATE OF ROBERT MEDLEY is represented by James Hyman Gallery
