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Thursday 4 December 2008

Dancing lines

Leon Kossoff: Unique Prints
Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter's St, London, N1, until 21 June

Paintings of Stockport by Helen Clapcott
Stockport Art Gallery, until 28 June

Clapcott is one of those modest artists who works away without much public acclaim or attention. She used to exhibit regularly in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the 1970s and 80s until the standards of selection changed and the noise of attention-grabbing drowned out her quiet harmonies. Since then, there have been one or two shows of her work in London, but she is better known up north. Her work deserves a wider audience for the haunting beauty of its post-industrial vision, its beguiling mixture of delicacy and toughness. Her paintings are dominated by architecture, but landscape keeps breaking in. Hills like stacks of hay or great lumps of green cheese, cut about to allow through fidgety human transport (rows of tiny cars, toy trains, insectile cranes), dwarf even the substantial factories built below them, the great industrial buildings of yesteryear, now steadily being dismantled before our eyes. Clapcott paints these things with great affection, with a brush dipped in light, with a nod to Lowry but with an interpretation all her own. Not for nothing has she been called the Poet of Stockport. Recommended.

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