Tony Bevan / Glenys Johnson

In May and June Frith Street Gallery will be showing a selection of new work by Tony Bevan and Glenys Johnson. Both artists have received significant notice in this country, but this is the first time their work has been seen in London in recent years.

The exhibition in the upper gallery centres around Bevan’s recent drawings – complementing his concurrent exhibition of paintings at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Glenys Johnson’s striking set of paintings, ‘Crowd’, occupies the lower gallery.

Bevan’s painting has long been recognised for the enhanced specificity of its subject matter – his ability to lay the image bare with a reduced range of colours and conventions. Indeed, his drawings and studies, with their clear, bold contours, have the power and presence of early expressionist drawings. Bevan’s drawings are rooted in the present day, revealing at once their subject’s vulnerability and struggle for dignity.

Glenys Johnson’s use of contemporary news photos also sets her work in a present day context. She has been using them as a basis for her paintings for some time – as a way to explore both ‘otherness’ (they record a moment in ‘another place’) and the relationship between the transitory nature of news imagery and the permanence of painting. ‘Crowd’ is based on a newspaper photograph published near the end of the Gorbachev era; a sea of faces gaze towards us or the unseen focus of a demonstration. Stretching across six canvases, Johnson’s use of paint and graphite approximates the grainy texture of the image. The result is a set of works that bear witness to a momentous point in time, yet test representation to its full.

Bevan and Johnson are engaged in a discussion about the possibilities and conventions of representation, exploring its potential for meanings across a broad spectrum of emotional and philosophical expression. By using socially-concerned subject matter they challenge us to change our way of looking both at art and the world.