LONDON.- Flowers Gallery announced that Camberwell Flats by Night by David Hepher has been acquired for the Guildhall Art Gallery collection.

David Hepher has lived and worked in London for more than six decades, and his work has been inspired by the city’s architecture throughout his career.

Hepher first started painting South- East London’s high-rise architecture in the 1970s, inspired by the scale and impact of the tower blocks on the London skyline. Camberwell Flats by Night, (1983), reflects Hepher’s sustained focus on residential architecture, and the details of ordinary, everyday life.

In this painting, the grid-like composition of stairways, balconies and brightly lit windows is reminiscent of earlier Modernist painting, while reflecting a post-war urban landscape very much of its own time. His work has been described by art critic, author and documentary film-maker Ben Lewis as both celebrating and mourning modernism in modes that are "futuristic and nostalgic, utopian and entropic."1

Hepher refers to his architecturally-themed works as landscape paintings, equating the powerful effects of the built environment on human experience to those of the natural world. He has said, "I think of myself as a landscape painter; I live in the city, so I paint the urban landscape."

Camberwell Flats by Night joins Guildhall Art Gallery’s unique collection of London pictures, and the work will be on display when Guildhall Art Gallery reopens in April 2022. David Hepher said: “I’m delighted that Camberwell Flats by Night is being exhibited at such a great space as Guildhall Art Gallery, and that it will contribute to our shared history of this city.”

David Hepher's work is also currently on view at Flowers Gallery, 21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ in the solo exhibition: Concrete Skies: The Vauxhall Series until April 2.

Born in Surrey, England in 1935, David Hepher studied at Camberwell School of Art and then the Slade School of Art, London, where he later became Professor and Head of Painting. His work is featured in national collections includingTate,Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts Council England and the Contemporary Arts Society. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at London’s Serpentine, Whitechapel and Hayward Gallery and was included in Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry Selects from the Arts Council Collection, Hayward Touring; British Council Collection: My Yard, Whitechapel Gallery; Out of Britain, National Museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Reality: Modern & Contemporary British Painting at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Cambridge and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK. An extensive monograph written by art critic, author and documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis. David Hepher: Grain of Concrete, Utopia and Entropy was published by Flowers Gallery in 2017.