Artist: Dennis Creffield

The Artist Room presents Cityscapes, a solo presentation of works by Dennis Creffield (1931–2018).

Born in 1931 in South London, Dennis Creffield emerged from a childhood of relative poverty to become one of Britain's most influential post-war painters, notably receiving solo exhibitions at the Barbican and Serpentine Galleries in his lifetime. A student of David Bomberg and a subsequent member of the Borough Group (with fellow contemporaries Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden and Frank Auerbach), Creffield went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London. In 1987, he was commissioned by the Arts Council to draw all 26 of England's mediaeval cathedrals which culminated in a celebrated body of work that firmly anchored Creffield’s place in the canon of British art.

This presentation spans three decades and showcases early works from his time at the Slade (Greenwich from the Royal Observatory, 1958; Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 1959; Greenwich, Looking down river, 1960), (East London Scene, c.1960), a painting made during his Gregory Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds (Paysage (Leeds), 1965), and finally a work created at his first residence in Brighton (Lewes Crescent & Garden from the East, 1970), a geographical move that marked a pivotal release within Creffield’s later years. This presentation demonstrates Creffield’s remarkable ability to collapse atmosphere into tangible entity, translating the essence of his subjects into bold forms that distil the energy of a city as object, alive and vibrating.

In 2022, Lund Humphries published Art and Life, a major monograph on Creffield’s artistic output, including textual contributions from Richard Cork and Howard Jacobson.

Works by Creffield are held any many prominent public collections, including including Tate, UK; British Museum, UK; Arts Council Collection, UK; The Government Art Collection, UK; Guildhall Museum, UK; Pallant House Gallery, UK; Towner Art Gallery, UK; Whitworth Museum, UK; City Art Gallery, UK; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA, among many others.