Description
JOHN HITCHENS – Elements of Landscape is the first book to look extensively at the artist’s extraordinary period of creativity and innovation over the past three decades, in which he has developed a radical engagement with the natural world. It follows five years after Aspects of Landscape, the first overview of his work, compiled to mark his 80th birthday in 2020.
Hitchens first achieved acclaim in the 1960s and ’70s, when a series of successful exhibitions led to acquisitions of his work by numerous public and private collections in the UK and overseas. From 1990 he embarked on a new approach to painting, involving working intimately with the land, and with natural materials and objects found in the landscape. He also created a highly personal kind of abstraction and imagined landscape forms, setting his work apart from conventional abstract painting and Land Art.
Elements of Landscape copiously illustrates the breadth and power of this recent work, featuring paintings on shaped and mixed-media canvases, as well as Hitchens’ land art projects on the Sussex coast. Other chapters examine his work with wood, paintings on stones, and placements of found objects.
Sandy Mallet’s text is based on extensive interviews, and supplemented with the artist’s own comments on his paintings, providing an important insight into this rich period of the artist’s work, where he has found a new way to celebrate the natural world and the Sussex landscape that surrounds his home.
Authors’ biographies
Dr Frances Guy is a curator who has worked with art galleries such as Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, The Hepworth Wakefield, the Kroller-Muller Museum in The Netherlands and Turner Contemporary in Margate, as well as Abbot Hall, Kendal, and English Heritage. She has contributed to numerous publications such as Arp: The Poetry of Forms (2017).
Sandy Mallet is a writer and artist, and has previously worked as a gallery director, curator and arts journalist. He has written widely on Modern British and Contemporary Art, and the art world, with publications including Ivon Hitchens: Under the Greenwood (2016), Kenneth Armitage: How Many Miles to Babylon (2016) and Rose Hilton (2018). He has also managed and curated exhibitions, with projects including the V&A, The Ashmolean, and Southampton City Art Gallery.
Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer and picture editor. She works mainly for arts organisations, such as ART UK and the Royal Academy of Arts, and has published and illustrated several books, such as J.M.W. Turner’s House (2017), Gainsborough’s House (2023) and artists’ monographs, including Diana Armfield – A Lyrical Eye (2020). Her work is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, the archive of Tate, and the National Art Library among others.
