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Bryan Senior

b. 1935

Born in Bolton, Senior studied at Clifton College, Cambridge University where he read Modern Languages and finally Chelsea School of Art. He lived in London from 1957 and exhibited widely including with the Redfern Gallery, Wildenstein, Roland Browse and Delbanco and Arnolfini Gallery. His early work showed him to be in sympathy with the 'Kitchen Sink' group of painters who concentrated on ordinary domestic scenes employing heavy impasto to create highly textured paint surfaces. A major exhibition of works painted in this manner was staged at The Art Gallery, Bolton in 1960. He had a wide range of solo shows, including Crane Kalman and Fieldborne Galleries, Architectural Association, Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, Ashgate Gallery in Farnham and abroad, including Ireland, Italy and America. Writing about his work he has said, 'Ideally, I am trying to create objects for contemplation, that give the sensation of a new experience - something timeless and serene. It would be good to be able to float the pictures on to the canvas, if that were feasible.' His work has won several awards and CASW, Nuffield Foundation, Financial Times, Hampstead Museum and Bolton Museum and Art Gallery hold examples of his work. Whilst many of his contemporaries turned to abstraction during the 1960s, Senior has remained determinedly a realist painter and in recent years has completed a series of large scale crowd pictures featuring figures in streets, markets and museums etc. These highly distilled images, revealing acute powers of observation, have a haunting, almost ghostly quality. Latterly he has lived in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

The Court Gallery will be staging an important exhibition of Bryan Senior's paintings from the 50s and 60s in the Autumn of 2013. We would urge anyone who has works from this period to get in touch with us.