John Blackburn | Revisitation Paintings

From 13/01/2023 To 18/02/2023

Work by the acclaimed abstract artist John Blackburn, focused on late-career reworkings of earlier pieces

Curated by Jacquiline Creswell and produced in association with Osborne Samuel, the exhibition features a never-before-seen set of Blackburn’s ‘revisitation paintings’, works the artist produced by reconsidering earlier paintings and exploring the original ideas afresh.

John Blackburn was born in 1932. His artistic reputation was first established in the early 1960s when he was collected extensively by Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. After a long hiatus beginning in the late 1960s, he began exhibiting again in 2006 with a major museum show in Folkestone. It was here his association with Osborne Samuel began, with the gallery going on to show his work in several exhibitions, most recently the retrospective ‘John Blackburn at 90: Seven Decades of Painting’ in September 2022. This was the last exhibition of his work John got to see before he sadly passed away in October 2022.

"Many of the paintings on show will be exhibited for the first time. Blackburn has refined and distilled his artistic passions without losing any of the tension and structure of his earlier works. These revisited works have a delicate fragility, a stillness and purity of line and form, yet they possess an enhanced tension which elevates them to the realms of the ethereal." – Jacquiline Creswell, curator