Two major exhibitions are opening at Huddersfield Art Gallery – one reflecting a lifetime’s work by Huddersfield-born artist David Tindle and the other a showcase of prizewinning British painters.
In what is a coup for the gallery, it is showing works spanning more than 60 years by Tindle, a senior Royal Academician, who is among the most renowned figurative painters of his generation.
Now 84-years-old, Tindle held his first exhibition in London at the age of 19 and was befriended by a circle of artists that included some of the biggest names in the art world – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, John Craxton, John Minton and Keith Vaughan. Their influence can be seen in his paintings from the 1950s and 60s.
In the early 1970s Tindle began using the Renaissance technique egg tempera to produce detailed portraits, landscapes and still lives. It is for his mastery of this difficult technique that he is perhaps best known.
Among Tindle’s most famous portrait commissions was to paint the actor Dirk Bogarde for the National Portrait Gallery back in 1985. A small version of this portrait study is shown in the Huddersfield exhibition.
Many of his works reflect his personal life and the places where he has lived. Married three times and with nine children, Tindle has painted domestic settings and gardens, often inspired by homes in England, France and Italy, where he now resides.
In more recent years his work has been tinged with a surreal, dreamlike and symbolic imagery, as he looks back on his long, eventful life.
David Tindle RA: A Retrospective can be seen from tomorrow (Saturday, November 12) until February 4, 2017.
The Contemporary British Painting Prize Group Show 2016, open from now until January 28, 2017, is exhibiting works by 15 shortlisted artists who entered the competition.
Chosen from 631 entrants who submitted more than 3,000 works of art, the selected paintings cover a wide range of styles and practices – from realism to abstraction – and include works by artists of all ages and levels of experience.
The winning entry is by London-based artist Cathy Lomax.
