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Wednesday, 1 November 2023

Artlyst: November Art Diary

My November Art Diary for Artlyst highlights exhibitions in Cambridge, Venice, Hastings, Lisbon, St David’s, Cookham and Colchester which explore aspects of relationships. These range from the familial to the transcendent through the work of Chantal Joffe, Celia Paul, Nengi Omuku, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Raul Speek, Stanley Spencer and Roger Wagner, among others:

'‘Everywhere is Heaven: Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner’ is the Stanley Spencer Gallery’s first collaboration with a living artist. Roger Wagner has been deeply inspired by Stanley Spencer’s paintings, and both artists have been described as ‘visionary geniuses’, each seeking to evoke the mystical in everyday experience. Just as Spencer found Cookham to be ‘heaven on earth’, so Wagner evokes biblical happenings in contemporary settings.

A number of works by Wagner, who is also a published poet, will be hung alongside Spencer’s from the Gallery Collection and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, including ‘Builders of the Tower of Babel’ and ‘Making Columns for the Tower of Babel’. The two artists are united by a love of ‘metaphysicals’, as Spencer would have said, including the poets John Donne and Thomas Traherne. Traherne, in particular, wrote with a visionary innocence and found mysticism in the natural world. The title of the exhibition references Spencer’s own words about his painting, ‘John Donne arriving in Heaven’, which has been loaned for this exhibition, and his description of the four figures facing in all directions because ‘everywhere is heaven so to speak’.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Roger Wagner - I Saw The Seraphim.

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