LONDON.- Ordovas announces Cressida’s Dream, an exhibition of works by Bill Jacklin RA (b. 1943), which the artist has created in response to a novella by Simon Astaire. The exhibition will include forty-one works as well as a limited-edition artist’s book. This exhibition is the result of their creative dialogue during the recent lockdowns. Like many people who found new expressive outlets during this period, Astaire and Jacklin both explored fresh creative terrain in their work and conversations. Astaire, who has known Jacklin for many years, was inspired to write a fantasy while spending lockdown in England. Jacklin, who spent lockdown in rural Rhode Island, was intrigued by the story and a long-distance artistic correspondence ensued, culminating in his illustrations for Cressida’s Dream.
This work marks a new direction for Jacklin, who, after moving to New York in 1985, has long focused on painting what he calls ‘urban portraits’ of the city in all its guises, from large scale canvases of crowds in flux to intimate moments in Seurat-like etchings. While the new images display his long fascination with the movement of light and quasi-abstract forms in motion, they possess a more fanciful, colourful quality and a more diverse range of subjects than the metropolitan scenes for which he is better known.
‘I have found it inspiring to work in a different way – my illustrations have been directed by Simon’s story, which has enabled me to work on various places and subjects that otherwise I would not have thought of,’ says Bill Jacklin.
Ordovas is known for exhibiting internationally established twentieth-century and contemporary artists, presented in an art historical context. The gallery often pairs different creative voices in its London and New York gallery programme. The current exhibition continues the gallery’s interest in exploring creative relationships. ‘This exhibition is a result of the creative collaboration that happened during the pandemic. The story was written for my daughter and I saw Bill’s work develop in response to it. Ordovas has become well known for the quality of our publications so I loved the idea of producing a limited edition and exhibiting the works,’ says Pilar Ordovas.
Astaire, whose work includes subjects close to his real world, was inspired to write a fantasy about saving his daughter because, as he comments: ‘I became a father again in later life, and I feel more helpless now than I did when I first became a father in my thirties. Why? Perhaps as I grow older, I see the world as even more threatening than ever before.’
