Preview: 19th March (5.30pm - 8pm)
Exhibition Dates: 20 March - 23 April
Location: 155 Ashley Road, Hale, Cheshire, WA14 2UW
This major exhibition marks both the 50th anniversary of L. S. Lowry’s death and the 150th anniversary of the birth of his tutor, Adolphe Valette. Yet it extends beyond commemoration, tracing a lineage of Northern artists across more than a century – from the early 20th century to artists painting today – exploring the landscapes, streets, and ways of seeing that define the North.
The artworks assembled reveal over 100 years of lived experience in the region. Across generations run parallels, recurring motifs of industrialism, and a continued fascination with commercial progression set against a nostalgia for traces of the past. For many of the artists displayed here, being out in the world to paint or sketch en plein air , at least in part, is central to their practice. From the impressionist strokes of Valette – who was reported to 'stand sketching with his paintbox supported by a strap around his neck' before completing works in the studio – to Lowry's street drawings, to the present day with Rob Pointon's commitment to painting outside no matter what the weather. Although distinct in subject, texture, and style, the works are nonetheless unified by the senses ignited by the North.
Running through the body of artworks there is also an urgent impulse to record. Consider St. John Deansgate (1928) by L.S. Lowry – a building demolished just three years later in 1931. There is a sense of the artwork functioning not only, with hindsight, as an architectural artefact, but the sketch itself as an act of resistance against potential loss, created in the midst of an uncertain interwar period. Such historical artworks ask of us, in our own period of uncertainty, what is being documented? Or rather, as art is never literal, how is the northern landscape being portrayed as a container for experience?
