The Artist’s Estate;
with Fischer Fine Art, London;
Rex Irwin, Sydney;
with The Court Gallery
Exhibition History:
Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Drawing On, 21 March – 7 June 2015;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Road to Abstraction, 21 May – 24 July 2016;
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Land | Sea | Life: A British Art Collection, 20 October 2017 – 17 February 2018;
London, The Sammy Ofer Centre, London Business School, London|Forward Facing, 2 April – 18 July 2018;
Cookham, The Stanley Spencer Gallery, Counterpoint: Stanley Spencer and his contemporaries, 28 March – 3 November 2019
David Bomberg, expelled from the Slade in 1913, was one of the most radical artists in that intake of students which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington. He was hugely influenced by the Cubism and Futurism of the European avant-garde, and broke with current conventions in his search for what he called ‘Pure Form’, seeking to represent the energy of the machine age through a fragmentation of the human figure into geometric shards and shapes. Bomberg served on the Western Front in the First World War, and was profoundly affected by his experience. This drawing, from 1919-20, retains some of Bomberg’s previous angularity, but the rendition of the figures is much softer, and the energy is diminished.
