Exhibition: William Crozier: Nature into Abstraction

Brought together again after five decades, a series of landscapes by the Scots-Irish artist William Crozier (1930-2011) are on display, showcasing why he became one of the leading artists of the post-war generation.

Produced between 1958 and 1961 when the artist was temporarily living in north Essex, the daring and original landscapes are infused with an existential angst common in Crozier´s work. Over 30 works will be on display, some that have not been seen for a generation, showing a painter who throughout his career walked a tightrope between representation and abstraction.

Most of the pictures were executed in London, and Crozier´s widow Katharine Crouan remarked that Crozier would often finish his landscapes in places far away from where he first collected and stored their views. The landscapes could therefore be categorised as imagined or reinvented, imbued with Crozier´s own influences and obsessions. He summed up his existential approach to what he saw by saying that landscapes were made in the image of the artist´s ‘own disappointment or eccentricity’. The battlefields of World War One were on Crozier’s mind when painting the Essex flatlands, and subsequent depictions involved skeletal figures such as Untitled (Figure) (1961) where horizontal lines eventually form a ribcage, and the horizon is cropped with a skull. In recent years the Imperial War Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland have acquired examples of Crozier’s skeletal figure works, acknowledging their importance in art of the period.

This exhibition, which has been organised in collaboration with the William Crozier Estate, will demonstrate how an artist responded against the popular American Abstract Expressionism of the time, and drew on a strong personal sense of European identity to create works that reflect the anxieties of the age. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an insightful essay by the art writer and editor Thomas Marks.