Artists: Gillian Ayres - Max Bainbridge - Max Boyla - Tim Garwood - Caroline Jackson

Sim Smith presents the group exhibition Shake the cloud from off your brow, bringing together five British artists including the pioneering abstract painter Gillian Ayres (1930 – 2018), Max Bainbridge, Max Boyla, Tim Garwood and Caroline Jackson.

The exhibition looks to British art history, its radical developments in abstract painting and sculpture and the effects it has had on generations of artists in the UK. It follows artists who have broadened and continued to develop their practice in unexpected ways, all somehow rooted to the British landscape.

The works in this exhibition draw on relationships, not just between individuals but also between people and their environments. The paintings and sculpture connect with a visual language, something separate from a verbal language which is inherent in us all. All of the artists in this exhibition cite the significance of the UK’s counties and landscapes on their work and life, all the way from Cornwall to Scotland. Many of the paintings, although created in pure abstraction, take on organic forms or the feeling of a landscape that is actual and familiar, through their surface, scale, formal organisation or process. The work by Max Bainbridge discovers the exhibition's essence in sculptural terms, further allowing for a direct engagement with the physical presence of the work, situating the viewer directly within the space the artists have created.

These artists talk a universal language, reaffirmed through abstraction and sculpture with an unremitting sense of confidence, freedom and vitality. Their energy is something we can all draw from as we live through tumultuous times of our own, the power of artistic practice that we can all connect with remains crucial.