The Art Exhibitions Blog

Just before Christmas, we discovered Cyril Mann 's astonishing Solid Shadow Paintings  at Piano Nobile in west London. So the chance to see the wider range of this forgotten British artist's work at The Lightbox in Woking -- an impressive venue we'd never visited before -- wasn't one we were going to pass up. Cyril Mann: Painter of Light and Shadow  seeks to tell the story of a troubled artist who embraced a variety of styles during his career. Born in London in 1911, Mann grew up in Nottingham and became the youngest ever recipient of a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art at the age of 12. He spent time in Canada before returning to study at the Royal Academy and then went to Paris to train under the Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson, painter of that bacchanalian extravaganza Les eus . Mann was always interested in the effects of sunlight and shadow, and among the exhibits in this show is a notebook from 1937 recording his observations. The shadow side of the...

For a period in the 1950s, Cyril Mann developed a striking and distinctive style of painting that now looks to have been ahead of its time. The pictures that tell how a dark council flat in Islington produced a little bit of art history can be seen in The Solid Shadow Paintings  at the Piano Nobile gallery in west London. Mann , who was born in 1911, had previously explored the effects of natural light, but at the start of the 50s the local council rehoused him to a flat above a gold-bullion broker near Old Street. For insurance reasons, there were bars on the windows, and no natural light found its way in. So the artist turned on the light -- and started to explore the effects of the harsh shadows it cast, with boldly outlined, simplified objects in exaggerated colours. The shadows seem almost as solid as the objects themselves. In this Dish of Fruit , the eye is caught not only by the white highlights on the individual pieces of fruit, but by the way the shadow falls like a ...