Скачать или смотреть William Turnbull, "Paintings 1959-1962", at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Kanaal

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present William Turnbull: Paintings 1959–1962, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation focuses on a seminal period in Turnbull’s career, offering a rare opportunity to experience a group of works that have seldom been shown in public.

William Turnbull (1922–2012) was a central figure in postwar British art, whose practice spanned both painting and sculpture with an uncommon balance of form, colour and abstraction. Born in Dundee and based in London for most of his life, Turnbull emerged in a cultural climate that remained tied to figurative and romantic modes of expression. In the years immediately following World War II, British art was still marked by reconstruction and restraint, with abstraction regarded by many as a foreign or overly intellectual pursuit. Against this backdrop, Turnbull’s engagement with international modernism signaled a decisive and independent direction.

The materiality of Turnbull’s paintings is central to their effect. He applied colour in thin, even layers that enhance luminosity while preserving the tactile presence of the canvas. As critic Lawrence Alloway observed in 1961: “Materiality in painting has often been identified with the weight of paint lying thickly on the canvas. To Turnbull, however, like Rothko in this respect, materiality is a function of the ground itself. His colour is flat and bodiless as a dye, so that the tangibility of the canvas surface itself is preserved.” Turnbull’s surfaces, at once restrained and radiant, invite a quiet attentiveness, a form of looking that is both intimate and expansive.
While his sculptural work of the same period explored mass, balance and physical presence, these paintings investigate space through stillness and light. The absence of gesture excess or narrative distinguishes Turnbull’s work from that of his American contemporaries, whose emphasis on emotional intensity and physicality he both admired and quietly resisted. Instead, his paintings embody a clarity and discipline that bridge European formalism with the existential depth of postwar abstraction.
This focused presentation allows for a concentrated encounter with Turnbull’s mature abstraction. The selection foregrounds the precision, coherence and contemplative quality that define this period of his practice. Visitors are invited to engage with the works not as images, but as environments of thought and perception, as “banners carrying the ideogram of our time.”