CHURT.- Summers Place Auctions will be offering the personal collection of Eddie Powell, the well known owner and curator of The Sculpture Park, in Churt, Surrey. Over the last 40 years Eddie has not only collected sculpture, but also paintings, photographs, furniture and objet d'art. The over 200 lots included in the sale on Tuesday, 23rd June 2015 will be reflecting this.

Eddie Powell is also a well-known collector of works by iconic artist Robert Lenkiewicz. The sale will include an important group of over 40 pictures and prints by the artist, with estimates from £80-150 for a print up to £20,000-30,000 for the top lot, The painter with Samantha , an oil on canvas from 1989.

Robert Lenkiewicz was born in London in 1941, the son of refugees who ran a Jewish hotel in Fordwych Road catering mostly to elderly residents. At sixteen Lenkiewicz attended St Martin’s College of Art & Design and later the Royal Academy. However, he was virtually impervious to contemporary art fashions, being more interested in his favourite paintings in the National Gallery.

Inspired by the example of Albert Schweitzer, Lenkiewicz threw open the doors of his studios to anyone in need of a roof – down and outs, addicts, criminals and the mentally ill congregated there. These individuals were the subjects of his paintings as a young man.

He moved to Plymouth in 1969 and continued on the same lines, but attracted so many vagrants and street alcoholics that Lenkiewicz was forced to commandeer derelict warehouses to house them. One of these also served as a studio and in 1973 became the exhibition space for the Vagrancy Project.

Eddie's collection includes various portraits and works from the such projects as Death and the Maiden (1974), Mental Handicap (1976), Suicide (1979/80), and Death (1982), Sexual Behaviour (1983), Painter & Women (1988/89), Addictive Behaviour (1997) and one of his work during his 'Painting painted blind' project (2000). Lenkiewicz continued to examine the lives of ostracised, hidden sections of the community in all his works and often adopted a metaphorical pictorial style to portray ‘human physiology in a state of crisis’.

Lenkiewicz concluded that the kinds of sensations people felt when a lover abandoned them or when their cherished beliefs were threatened were identical to the withdrawal symptoms and anxieties experienced by addicts or alcoholics. The Projects thus became an extended study in `addictive behaviour’ – the title of his 20th Project, unfinished at the time of his death in 2002. His own observations were supported by his 25,000 volume private library, which contained large sections on philosophy, theology, fascism, anti-Semitism, the witchcraft phenomenon and the occult, and which he viewed as a history of `fanatical belief systems’.

Robert Lenkiewicz died on 5 August 2002 from a serious heart condition. In his obituary of Lenkiewicz, art critic David Lee observed: `Robert’s greatest gift was to show us that an artist could be genuinely concerned about social and domestic issues and attempt the difficult task of expressing this conscience through the deeply unfashionable medium of figurative painting. In that sense he was one of a few serious painters of contemporary history.’

Eddie Powell added: “I started collecting Lenkiewicz after his death, but had always been fascinated by his skill and rebel attitude to creating portraits of subjects contemporary art would normally shun. I will be sad to see most of them go, but I hope they will go to equally discerning collectors.”