The Grosvenor Gallery, Eric Estorick’s famous gallery which, in recent years, has been operating from offices in South Moulton Street, has moved to the spacious premises vacated by the Albemarle Gallery in Albemarle Street. It marks a change of speed for a business long associated with the work of Erté; the artist’s death, and the end of a lease, have prompted a reconsideration and director Ray Perman has decided that now is the right time to relaunch the gallery with a series of exhibitions. His programme, which will concentrate upon modern and contemporary Italian art and include work from Russia and Eastern European countries, is inaugurated by forty-five gouaches, watercolours and drawings by Mario Sironi (21 April-14 May) dating from 1916. With Sironi’s inclusion in the Tate Gallery’s “On Classic Ground”, and a general reappraisal of European art between the wars, it is a timely decision and brings out of retirement Estorick, now eighty and recently living in New York and Barbados, who built his reputation in the art market by buying Futurist and Surrealist paintings shortly after the conclusion of World War II.
Lisa Milroy has not exhibited new paintings in London since 1988 when she showed with Nicola Jacobs, although there was a museum exhibition at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre and in Southampton the following year. More recently, she has exhibited with Mary Boone in New York and was one of several British artists included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1991. Her new exhibition at Waddington (7 April-1 May), the month’s most exciting development in Cork Street, comprises twenty-five canvases and provides evidence of several new directions in her work. Waddington’s exhibition launches a busy season for Milroy. This show travels to the Museum Schloss Hardenberg in Velbert in the summer, and there are two different Continental gallery exhibitions planned for the autumn, at Jennifer Flay in Paris and with Luis Campana in Cologne. In other galleries in and near Cork Street, Browse and Darby is commemorating Jeffrey Camp’s seventieth birthday with a small retrospective exhibition (to 24 April). Mayor has mounted an exhibition titled “The Figure” (to 30 April) and featuring thirty-six British and international artists represented by paintings, drawings or sculpture. Under the title of “Irony and Ecstacy”, Salama-Caro is showing twenty younger American artists, including Lydia Dona, Susanne McClelland, Nicholas Rule and Raymond Pettibone (21 April-29 May). Curated by Klaus Ottmann, editor of the Journal of Contemporary Art in New York, this exhibition makes use of both floors of the gallery for the first occasion. At Benjamin Rhodes there are new paintings by Tricia Gilman (to 24 April), abstract tapestries of paint into which she has introduced charming pictograms of her young son and his world of toys, flowers and butterflies. Thomas Gibson’s new commitment to contemporary British art continues with an exhibition of paintings by Paul Harbutt (to 16 April) who showed with Long and Ryle in 1990 and 1991. His current paintings rework and develop the imagery of Magritte’s earlier Surrealist paintings.
In Dering Street, leading Spanish artist Susan Solano is showing new sculptures at Anthony Reynolds (to 10 April), coinciding with her impressive retrospective survey organised for the Palacio de Velazquez, Madrid, and currently showing at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (to 2 May). That survey will be seen at the Konsthall, Malmö and Le Magasin, Grenoble through the summer. Annely Juda is exhibiting new wood sculptures by David Nash (22 April-22 May).
At Lisson, there is an exhibition of new works by Anish Kapoor (16 April-20 May). It features new stone sculptures intended to be shown outdoors as well as in the gallery, a new red “Void” from that continuing series of wall sculptures, one of which was shown in Kapoor’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and material related to the stage designs which he made for recent performances by dancer Laurie Booth at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Alison Wilding’s new sculpture will be shown at Karsten Schubert (22 April-22 May) and with his partner, Richard Salmon.
At Flowers East, Alison Watt is showing nude portraits, some of which are self-portraits, and smaller head studies (to 18 April) in her first gallery exhibition since her impressive debut at the Scottish Gallery in 1990. Her work was included in a recent initiative in Los Angeles, where local galleries invited dealers from other countries to mount exhibitions of their artists, and Matthew Flowers took a selection of paintings to Salander O’Reilly. Purdy Hicks is showing work by gallery artists (to 13 May) including pictures by Gillian Ayres who will be holding an exhibition in May.
The following exhibitions were listed in last month’s column and deserve recognition before they close: the large exhibition of sculpture, paintings and miniatures by Francesco Clemente at Anthony d’Offay (to 30 April), Catherine Lee’s beautifully patinated wall reliefs at Annely Juda
(to 17 April), the retrospective of paintings and works on paper by Victor Willing at Karsten Schubert and Richard Salmon (to 17 April), the, new sculptures by John Davies at Marlborough (to 30 April) and William MacIlraith’s paintings at Connaught Brown (to 20 April).