TONY BEVAN: Paintings

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to announce an exhibition of Tony Bevan. His new work has not been shown in London for more than three years. Bevan has trained at Slade School of Art and held over 40 solo exhibitions within Europe and America since his first solo exhibit in 1976. His paintings and drawings are created with high intensity and are highly expressive. Bevan's works are immensely tactile thanks to the fact that he is applying charcoal - made from different woods - and using his own pure pigments which are often pressed into his paintings. Many of his works are produced while lying flat on the ground allowing Bevan to force the pigment into the pores of the canvas or paper.

In the exhibition will be several Head paintings shown. Being an artist working alone in his studio, Bevan has repeatedly chosen to paint himself over the years; so to speak Bevan is his most faithful subject. Over those years these portraits have gone through tremendous transformation where his head is often only depicted with the help of a few lines. Not only does Bevan reduce his head to a couple of intense strokes, but he also chooses to paint his head from the most unusual and unexpected angles. There are some images where the viewer is forced to look up his overextended nostrils, as the canvasses are often larger than life. In these portraits, which are comparable to Francis Bacon's distorted paintings, mixed emotions such as anger, frustration and pain come through.