LONDON- Old Bond Street’s first new gallery for 10 years will open on Tuesday 15 March 2011 when Thomas Williams launches its greatly expanded and re-modelled exhibition space. The new gallery is housed in a striking 1900 building, originally commissioned by the Duveen family, which has been restored to its original purpose for the first time since the Second World War. The 2,500 square foot space has been has been created by the emerging young designer, Abbie de Bunsen.
Founded in 1989 Thomas Williams is renowned for showing leading contemporary representational artists and in 2011 will present solo exhibitions of new work by Alessandro Raho, Lucy Cavendish and Paul Simonon. The program for 2012 includes an exhibition of work by Californian artists of the 60s and 70s. Thomas Williams is also a longstanding dealer in Old Master drawings, with an annual exhibition held in the gallery each July.
The gallery re-opens with an exhibition of the critically acclaimed artist, Lars Elling, his first ever show in a UK gallery (15 March – 28 April 2011). In Elling’s visually arresting paintings, reality is blurred into dreamscape through a layered narrative. The Norwegian artist leads the way in the current renaissance of figurative art and his large scale paintings - such as Mother’s Day and Initiation (shown) – will make for one of the most exciting shows of Spring 2011.
The paintings are filled with melodramatic motifs that evoke childhood, nostalgia, cruelty and anonymity. These images brilliantly explore the dramatic potential inherent in combining familiar but disparate imagery. His work has been compared to Francis Bacon and Paula Rego. Fans of Elling’s work include Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and US art critic David Shapiro.
The paintings will be on sale from £5,000 to £25,000. His most recent shows have been in New York and Oslo.
Lars Elling was born in Norway in 1966 and trained at the Bergen National Academy of Art for a degree and masters in Fine Art. Since the late 1990s he has held solo exhibitions in Oslo, Chicago and New York. Awards received include the Deutscher Jugendileraturpreis (Munich), the Prix Octagon (Paris) and the Ragnvald Blix Legacy (Copenhagen). His work is represented in many public collections, including the Norwegian National Gallery, Oslo and the European Commission, Brussels. A published playwright, he lives and works in Oslo.
