11 – 14 October 2012
McCaffrey Fine Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by the renowned British artist William Scott (1913-1989) at Frieze Masters. The exhibition will be on view in Regent’s Park from 11-14 October and will feature 10 large format works dated from 1965-1980. This presentation informally kicks off the centennial celebrations of the birth of the artist in 1913.
Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland and grew up in Northern Ireland. Though he received his art training in Belfast and London, his outlook and interests were abroad in continental Europe and the United States. While remaining faithful to the centuries-old genres of still life and the nude, he pursued innovation through the use of an intentionally awkward line, aggressive impasto, and flattened perspective to create works that possess great subtlety and resonance.
Upon meeting Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock on a visit to New York in the summer of 1953, he found new freedom in scale and color; his canvases enlarged and the palette warmed upon his return to Britain. Scott’s first exhibition with the Hanover Gallery, London took place in the month before his NY trip. His first NY exhibition was in 1954 (Hepworth, Scott, and Bacon) at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Scott showed with great acclaim at the Hanover until 1971 and Martha Jackson until 1979, becoming, along with Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, one of the few British artists of his generation to gain an international reputation. Thereafter, representation of Scott in Britain passed to Gimpel Fils and lapsed in the United States after the closure of the Martha Jackson Gallery. Scott passed away in 1989.
Scott represented Britain at the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958. The first major retrospective of his work occurred in 1960 at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. Further retrospectives took place at Kunsthalle Bern, 1963; the Tate Gallery, London, 1972; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1975; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1986; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1998.
Further centennial events include:
• February 2013: William Scott: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings will be published.
This four volume publication reflects a decade of research undertaken by the William Scott Foundation under the supervision of Sarah Whitfield.
• January 2013 ushers in Tate’s William Scott which tours Tate, St. Ives;
• Followed by The Hepworth, Wakefield; and Ulster Museum, Belfast over the course of 2013/2014.
• The exhibitions will be accompanied by a catalogue produced by the William Scott Foundation in collaboration with the Tate. encapsulating the tour, in its final manifestation in Belfast.
• January 2013: Tate Publishing will release a new monograph on the work of William Scott written by Sarah Whitfield.
Together these initiatives represent an unprecedented reassessment of William Scott’s singular work.