David Tress, Balloons at Bath, 2009
David Tress, Swainswick near Bath,
2010.
David Tress, Bath, Passing Trade,
graphite on paper, 2009
David Tress, Morning, Wenlock Edge,
graphite on paper, 2008
David Tress, Early Spring. Farleigh
Hungerford Somerset, mixed media on paper, 2009
David Tress: Landmarks
27 November - 6 February 2011
David Tress is one of Britain’s foremost
landscape painters. The paintings and graphite drawings in this new
exhibition, created especially for Bath, are in one sense a
southern extension to Tress’s Chasing Sublime Light
project, in which he revisited the 18th-century artistic
tours made by the likes of Girtin and Turner in north Wales and
England.
All the works in the exhibition are for
sale. View the online catalogue
here. For all enquiries and/or purchases please contact
the Gallery Manager, Jon Benington victoria_enquiries@bathnes.gov.uk)
or Telephone 01225 477233.
For Landmarks, David took a tour
in and around Bath, a city and a landscape that have preoccupied
countless artists from Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Turner to John
Nash, Sickert and the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The fact that seven
of the works in the show feature urban or rural churches testifies
not only to our rich heritage of ecclesiastical architecture, but
also to the fact that these structures were conceived as the visual
and social focal points of community life – a truth that John Piper
also famously celebrated. On David’s terms, however, these
‘landmarks’ are the products of natural as much as manmade
processes.
David Tress was born in London in 1955 and
grew up there, showing an early interest in painting, drawing and
natural history. After studying science with
biology at A-level, he changed direction and spent a year at Harrow
College of Art, before taking a Fine Art degree course at Trent
Polytechnic.
While he was at Trent, he became involved
with experiments in conceptual and performance art, but later came
to question the assumptions of modernism. His rejection of
modernism was, however, not so much a return to the beginning, as a
rite of passage, which has brought to his landscape and figurative
painting some aspects of abstraction retained from his earlier
work.
David Tress has lived in West Wales since
1976. He has exhibited in Wales, England, Ireland, France, Holland
and America and has works in public collections including: The
National Museum of Wales, The Contemporary Art Society for Wales,
The National Library of Wales, MOMA Wales, The Guildhall Art
Gallery City of London, and Pallant House Gallery Chichester.