Robert Persey Sculpture
Paul Tonkin Painting
8th – 30th October 2016
Robert Persey
Robert Persey is a sculptor who studied at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1970s and then worked at Greenwich Studios in London before moving to Kent in the 1990s.
He has had solo exhibitions in Coventry and Milton Keynes but his work was shown for the first time in the New Contemporaries exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1977. Many group exhibitions followed, including the 12th Annual Stockwell Depot Show; Have You Seen Sculpture from the Body? at the Tate Gallery and Escultura Nueva, Reino Unido in Madrid.
His work is driven by a desire to understand and express a strong feeling of the physical in as full a spatial and three-dimensional context as possible…
Robert Persey 2016
Paul Tonkin
Paul Tonkin attended Canterbury Art College 1970 – 1973. Soon after, Paul moved to London and he exhibited in the Annual Stockwell Depot Shows between 1976 and 1979 where he and Robert first met. John Hoyland invited him to exhibit in the 1980 Hayward Gallery Summer Exhibition alongside Albert Irvin, Frank Bowling and others.
By the late 80s he was working at Greenwich Studios in S.E. London. Later he became involved in establishing A.P.T. studios at Deptford Creekside nearby, where Paul has retained his studio ever since.
Paul’s paintings are analogous to jazz. Whilst both music and landscape contribute to the experiences which inform his work, he remains committed to non-representational colour painting built up from improvised elements…
