Oliver Bevan
Encyclopedia
Oliver Bevan is a British artist who was born in Peterborough
, UK, and educated at Eton College
. After leaving school he spent a year in 1959-60 working for Voluntary Service Overseas
in British North Borneo before returning to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art
, where he became strongly influenced by Op Art
and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely
. Bevan graduated from the RCA in 1964 and had his first exhibition of Op Art-inspired paintings the following year. Optical, geometric and kinetic art then served him well until the late 1970s, when he moved to the Canadian prairies for a two-year teaching post at the University of Saskatchewan
. By the time he returned to London in 1979 he had abandoned abstract art
in favour of figurative art
and urban realism.
and colour fields
in black, white and shades of grey, plus red and blue in Both Ways 1 and 2. The paintings were based on isometric projections of a cube and played on the viewer’s visual perception through tonal flicker, figure-ground reversals and other optical ambiguities which Bevan described as ‘a conflict between the certainty of the geometry and the uncertainty of the perceptual mechanism in dealing with it’, adding that the paintings are ‘clues to what might be possible’. The exhibition attracted favourable reviews from critics such as John Dunbar, Norbert Lynton
and Guy Brett, with the latter concluding that it 'achieves its aim of intensifying our awareness of our perceptual processes, which implies our awareness of the visible world'. A second exhibition of ten new paintings at the Grabowski Gallery in 1967 introduced shaped canvas
es and a larger colour palette to further 'provoke the viewer into an active relationship with the work'. This concept of viewer participation - whereby each person brings their own perceptual interpretation to the paintings and thus contributes to the creative process - was made tangible in a third exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery in 1969. This featured seventeen new works, including a tabletop piece consisting of sixteen square tiles which were each divided diagonally into two of four colours and could be rearranged by the viewer to create different combinations of figure and ground. Bevan then developed the idea further, using six magnetic tiles on a square steel sheet that was covered with black canvas and could be hung on the wall like a painting. This new work, Connections, was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in 1969-70 as part of Play Orbit, an exhibition of artworks that visitors could interact or 'play' with in the manner of toys and games. Meanwhile, a chance visit to the Grabowski exhibition by John Constable, the Art Director at Fontana Books, led to a commission for Bevan to create the cover paintings for the first twenty titles in a series on vanguard thinkers and theorists called the Fontana Modern Masters
. For this Bevan drew directly on his Connections piece, creating two sets of geometric cover designs that the reader could arrange as ‘tiles’ in a larger artwork. The books were published in 1970-73, by which time Bevan had also collaborated with the composers Brian Dennis and Grahame Dudley on a production at the Cockpit Theatre
of Dennis's Z'Noc, a thirty-minute experimental piece in which the musicians take their cues from a constantly-changing display of abstract colours, shapes and shadows that Bevan created by projecting light onto three mobiles
. This led Bevan to experiment with Polaroid as a medium for other types of kinetic art
, and in 1973 he produced the first of his lightbox
es using polarizing filters and fluorescent tubes, with more complex versions employing electric motors and sets of slowly rotating discs. These lightboxes became the canvases for 'chromatropic paintings' which, as Bevan explained, enable 'colours to be selected in time as well as space', resulting in a mesmerising display of changing colours and shifting shapes as forms dissolved and reappeared.
Between 1974 and 1978 Bevan's chromatropic or 'time' paintings were exhibited in London, Zurich, Detroit and Toronto, with pieces such as Turning World, Crescendo, Sunspot and Co-Incidence (now in the Government Art Collection
) winning plaudits from Ernst Gombrich
and others. Eight 'points' in the cycle of his Pyramid chromatrope were also used as Fontana Modern Masters covers, with the back of each book offering the following explanation: 'The painting is made of transparent materials which only assume colours when illuminated by polarised light. If the plane of polarisation is rotated slowly, which happens mechanically in a box designed to display the painting, the colours pass through a recurring cycle of change'.
in Farringdon and became 'a painter of modern life', citing Manet
, Degas
and Sickert
as influences along with the urban realism of New Objectivity
(‘Neue Sachlichkeit’) in Germany and Edward Hopper
and the Ashcan School
in New York. Bevan's subject was the area around his studio and scenes from everyday life such as people in cars, on buses, crossing streets and, later, supermarket interiors. Solo exhibitions of his Farringdon paintings at two London galleries in 1981 and 1984 were followed by two at the Barbican Centre
in 1986 and 1993. The latter presented Bevan's paintings of the Westway
flyover, an elevated dual carriageway in west London that had captivated him when his car broke down and was towed to a garage in the sunless and somewhat alienating space between the road's concrete stanchions. According to the writer Will Self
, Bevan 'was entranced by the shapes the flyover's decks described and embarked on a series of large-scale canvases that elegantly capture the strange dichotomies the road represents: its beauty and its terror, its light and its darkness'. During this period, Bevan also organised, curated and participated in two group exhibitions of urban paintings (The Subjective City in 1989-90 and Witnesses & Dreamers in 1993-94) which toured to public art galleries around the UK. A solo exhibition, Urban Mirror, at the Royal National Theatre
in 1997 continued his exploration of the painted city, with the writer Peter Ackroyd
comparing Bevan's work to that of 'Auerbach
and Kossoff
, who have a genuine painterly reverence for the real features of the streets and the people. In that sense he can claim a spiritual affinity with the line of London painters which stretches back as far as William Hogarth
’.
A second solo exhibition at the Royal National Theatre five years later presented a series of paintings that focused on a particular microcosm of urban life. The subject had presented itself in 1994, when Bevan moved to a new studio in disused classrooms at Wendell Park Primary School in west London. Walking to and from his studio each day, he became increasingly intrigued by the behaviour of the children in the playground, as he later explained:
'In zoological terms they are 'wild' for half an hour. This contrast between adult and child behaviour struck me more and more forcibly. While we, the adults, are fastidious about the space around our own bodies, only touching one another as a deliberate communication, the children are in continuous physical contact, holding hands, wrestling or skipping in pairs. The girls prefer more socialised games, forming groups to dance, skip or clap while the boys race, fight and kick footballs. My own childhood was unlike most of this, which is perhaps why I am so drawn to celebrate their physical energy, and cultural diversity ..... The children understood what I was doing and were excited to see themselves in the paintings'.
A selection of Bevan's urban paintings in public and corporate collections are as follows:
In 2001 Bevan relocated to the south of France, where the scope of his painting has broadened again to include landscapes and, more recently, the effect of light on water.
Peterborough
Peterborough is a cathedral city and unitary authority area in the East of England, with an estimated population of in June 2007. For ceremonial purposes it is in the county of Cambridgeshire. Situated north of London, the city stands on the River Nene which flows into the North Sea...
, UK, and educated at Eton College
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
. After leaving school he spent a year in 1959-60 working for Voluntary Service Overseas
Voluntary Service Overseas
Voluntary Service Overseas is an international development charity that works through experienced volunteers living and working as equals alongside local partners. It is the largest independent volunteer-sending organization in the world...
in British North Borneo before returning to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, where he became strongly influenced by Op Art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art.His work entitled Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art...
. Bevan graduated from the RCA in 1964 and had his first exhibition of Op Art-inspired paintings the following year. Optical, geometric and kinetic art then served him well until the late 1970s, when he moved to the Canadian prairies for a two-year teaching post at the University of Saskatchewan
University of Saskatchewan
The University of Saskatchewan is a Canadian public research university, founded in 1907, and located on the east side of the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. An "Act to establish and incorporate a University for the Province of Saskatchewan" was passed by the...
. By the time he returned to London in 1979 he had abandoned abstract art
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
in favour of figurative art
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
and urban realism.
Optical, geometric and kinetic art
Bevan's first solo exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery, London, in 1965 featured eight Op Art paintings with hard edgesHard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
and colour fields
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
in black, white and shades of grey, plus red and blue in Both Ways 1 and 2. The paintings were based on isometric projections of a cube and played on the viewer’s visual perception through tonal flicker, figure-ground reversals and other optical ambiguities which Bevan described as ‘a conflict between the certainty of the geometry and the uncertainty of the perceptual mechanism in dealing with it’, adding that the paintings are ‘clues to what might be possible’. The exhibition attracted favourable reviews from critics such as John Dunbar, Norbert Lynton
Norbert Lynton
Norbert Lynton was Professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex.He has published on architecture and on modern artists including Paul Klee, Ben Nicholson, William Scott. With Erika Langmuir, he coauthored the 'Yale Dictionary of Modern Art'...
and Guy Brett, with the latter concluding that it 'achieves its aim of intensifying our awareness of our perceptual processes, which implies our awareness of the visible world'. A second exhibition of ten new paintings at the Grabowski Gallery in 1967 introduced shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
es and a larger colour palette to further 'provoke the viewer into an active relationship with the work'. This concept of viewer participation - whereby each person brings their own perceptual interpretation to the paintings and thus contributes to the creative process - was made tangible in a third exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery in 1969. This featured seventeen new works, including a tabletop piece consisting of sixteen square tiles which were each divided diagonally into two of four colours and could be rearranged by the viewer to create different combinations of figure and ground. Bevan then developed the idea further, using six magnetic tiles on a square steel sheet that was covered with black canvas and could be hung on the wall like a painting. This new work, Connections, was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
in 1969-70 as part of Play Orbit, an exhibition of artworks that visitors could interact or 'play' with in the manner of toys and games. Meanwhile, a chance visit to the Grabowski exhibition by John Constable, the Art Director at Fontana Books, led to a commission for Bevan to create the cover paintings for the first twenty titles in a series on vanguard thinkers and theorists called the Fontana Modern Masters
Fontana Modern Masters
The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on the writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists whose ideas were shaping the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of...
. For this Bevan drew directly on his Connections piece, creating two sets of geometric cover designs that the reader could arrange as ‘tiles’ in a larger artwork. The books were published in 1970-73, by which time Bevan had also collaborated with the composers Brian Dennis and Grahame Dudley on a production at the Cockpit Theatre
Cockpit Theatre (Marylebone)
The Cockpit Theatre is a Fringe Theatre in Marylebone, London. The Cockpit Theatre was designed by Edward Mendelsohn built in 1969-70 by the Inner London Education Authority as a community theatre and is notable as London's first purpose built Theatre In The Round, since the Great Fire of London...
of Dennis's Z'Noc, a thirty-minute experimental piece in which the musicians take their cues from a constantly-changing display of abstract colours, shapes and shadows that Bevan created by projecting light onto three mobiles
Mobile (sculpture)
A mobile is a type of kinetic sculpture constructed to take advantage of the principle of equilibrium. It consists of a number of rods, from which weighted objects or further rods hang. The objects hanging from the rods balance each other, so that the rods remain more or less horizontal...
. This led Bevan to experiment with Polaroid as a medium for other types of kinetic art
Kinetic art
Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.-Kinetic sculpture:...
, and in 1973 he produced the first of his lightbox
Lightbox
Lightbox may refer to:* Various backlit viewing devices:** A container with several lightbulbs and a pane of frosted glass on the top. It is used by photography professionals viewing translucent films, such as slides. This device was originally used to sort photographic plates with ease. It is also...
es using polarizing filters and fluorescent tubes, with more complex versions employing electric motors and sets of slowly rotating discs. These lightboxes became the canvases for 'chromatropic paintings' which, as Bevan explained, enable 'colours to be selected in time as well as space', resulting in a mesmerising display of changing colours and shifting shapes as forms dissolved and reappeared.
Between 1974 and 1978 Bevan's chromatropic or 'time' paintings were exhibited in London, Zurich, Detroit and Toronto, with pieces such as Turning World, Crescendo, Sunspot and Co-Incidence (now in the Government Art Collection
Government Art Collection
The United Kingdom's Government Art Collection places works of art in major Government buildings in the UK and around the world to promote British art, culture and history....
) winning plaudits from Ernst Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...
and others. Eight 'points' in the cycle of his Pyramid chromatrope were also used as Fontana Modern Masters covers, with the back of each book offering the following explanation: 'The painting is made of transparent materials which only assume colours when illuminated by polarised light. If the plane of polarisation is rotated slowly, which happens mechanically in a box designed to display the painting, the colours pass through a recurring cycle of change'.
Figurative art and urban realism
On returning to London from Canada in 1979, Bevan rented a top-floor studio near Smithfield MarketSmithfield, London
Smithfield is an area of the City of London, in the ward of Farringdon Without. It is located in the north-west part of the City, and is mostly known for its centuries-old meat market, today the last surviving historical wholesale market in Central London...
in Farringdon and became 'a painter of modern life', citing Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
, Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
and Sickert
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
as influences along with the urban realism of New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
(‘Neue Sachlichkeit’) in Germany and Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
and the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
in New York. Bevan's subject was the area around his studio and scenes from everyday life such as people in cars, on buses, crossing streets and, later, supermarket interiors. Solo exhibitions of his Farringdon paintings at two London galleries in 1981 and 1984 were followed by two at the Barbican Centre
Barbican Centre
The Barbican Centre is the largest performing arts centre in Europe. Located in the City of London, England, the Centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhibitions. It also houses a library, three restaurants, and a conservatory...
in 1986 and 1993. The latter presented Bevan's paintings of the Westway
Westway (London)
The Westway is a long elevated dual carriageway section of the A40 route in west London running from Paddington to North Kensington. The road was constructed between 1964 and 1970 to relieve congestion at Shepherd's Bush caused by traffic from Western Avenue struggling to enter central London on...
flyover, an elevated dual carriageway in west London that had captivated him when his car broke down and was towed to a garage in the sunless and somewhat alienating space between the road's concrete stanchions. According to the writer Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard "Will" Self is an English novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time...
, Bevan 'was entranced by the shapes the flyover's decks described and embarked on a series of large-scale canvases that elegantly capture the strange dichotomies the road represents: its beauty and its terror, its light and its darkness'. During this period, Bevan also organised, curated and participated in two group exhibitions of urban paintings (The Subjective City in 1989-90 and Witnesses & Dreamers in 1993-94) which toured to public art galleries around the UK. A solo exhibition, Urban Mirror, at the Royal National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
in 1997 continued his exploration of the painted city, with the writer Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award...
comparing Bevan's work to that of 'Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
and Kossoff
Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....
, who have a genuine painterly reverence for the real features of the streets and the people. In that sense he can claim a spiritual affinity with the line of London painters which stretches back as far as William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
’.
A second solo exhibition at the Royal National Theatre five years later presented a series of paintings that focused on a particular microcosm of urban life. The subject had presented itself in 1994, when Bevan moved to a new studio in disused classrooms at Wendell Park Primary School in west London. Walking to and from his studio each day, he became increasingly intrigued by the behaviour of the children in the playground, as he later explained:
'In zoological terms they are 'wild' for half an hour. This contrast between adult and child behaviour struck me more and more forcibly. While we, the adults, are fastidious about the space around our own bodies, only touching one another as a deliberate communication, the children are in continuous physical contact, holding hands, wrestling or skipping in pairs. The girls prefer more socialised games, forming groups to dance, skip or clap while the boys race, fight and kick footballs. My own childhood was unlike most of this, which is perhaps why I am so drawn to celebrate their physical energy, and cultural diversity ..... The children understood what I was doing and were excited to see themselves in the paintings'.
A selection of Bevan's urban paintings in public and corporate collections are as follows:
- Westway Triptych, 1987, now in the collection of the Museum of LondonMuseum of LondonThe Museum of London documents the history of London from the Prehistoric to the present day. The museum is located close to the Barbican Centre, as part of the striking Barbican complex of buildings created in the 1960s and 70s as an innovative approach to re-development within a bomb damaged...
. - Hanging On, 1989, now in the collection of Middlesbrough Art GalleryMiddlesbrough Institute of Modern ArtMiddlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or mima, is a contemporary art gallery based in the centre of Middlesbrough, England. The gallery was formally launched on Sunday 27 January 2007...
. - Apron, 1990, a series of four paintings commissioned by the British Airports Authority for Gatwick Airport.
- A drink before the show, 1994, commissioned by Art on the Underground and now in the collection of the London Transport Museum.
- Walk, 1995, now in the collection of the Guildhall Art GalleryGuildhall Art GalleryThe Guildhall Art Gallery houses the art collection of the City of London, England. It occupies a building that was completed in 1999 to replace an earlier building destroyed in The Blitz in 1941...
, London. - Balance, 1998, now in the collection of the Herbert Art Gallery and MuseumHerbert Art Gallery and MuseumHerbert Art Gallery & Museum is a museum, art gallery, records archive, learning centre and creative arts facility on Jordan Well, Coventry, United Kingdom....
, Coventry.
In 2001 Bevan relocated to the south of France, where the scope of his painting has broadened again to include landscapes and, more recently, the effect of light on water.