Printer: Mourlot

Dimensions: 73 x 48 cm

Very good: Very good 

Frame: Charcoal 

Description: Created for the International Art Biennale of Menton in 1972, this composition reflects Sutherland’s late return to printmaking, when lithography became central to his practice.

Working on the Riviera, he developed a language of bold, organic forms and heightened colour. In this version, a deep, saturated red anchors the image, intensifying the sense of structure and tension within the composition.

Artist: Graham Sutherland was a prolific English artist known for his paintings of abstract landscapes and portraits of public figures. He also worked with glass, fabrics, prints and portraits, his work largely inspired by landscape and religion. Printmaking, mostly of romantic landscapes, dominated Sutherland’s work during the 1920s, developing his skill in watercolours before switching to oil paints in the 1940s. It was these oil paintings, often of surreal, organic landscapes of the Pembrokeshire coast, that secured his reputation as a leading British modern artist. Sutherland taught at a number of art colleges, notably at Chelsea School of Art, and at Goldsmiths College where he had been a student. He served as an official war artist in the Second World War drawing industrial scenes on the British home front. As such, Sutherland was then commissioned to design the massive central tapestry in the new Coventry Cathedral in post-war Britain.