Four artists you ought to know — and a famous one you can know better

In this round-up of exhibitions in London’s commercial galleries, I feature three shows of little-known but mature contemporary British artists. There is a great deal of interesting and worthwhile art being made out there, but not enough of it comes to public attention. Most museums won’t show it, and there are only a handful of commercial gallerists who are prepared to back quality over proven popularity. In such a world, the quieter talents tend to get overlooked, so it is a particular pleasure to be able to draw your attention to the subtle small paintings of Liam Hanley (born 1933). Hanley paints in oil and draws in pencil on linen laid down on to paper. He has for many years been obsessed with a tract of land near the A10 in north Hertfordshire, and in particular with half-a-dozen huge fields that he loves to paint in mid-August when the crops have been harvested and the land ploughed and harrowed. Recently he has made of these fields a series of striated paintings, pattern-led designs, which transform the furrowed fields into more abstract arrangements of angular parallels. These delicately delineated but robust compositions capture something of the landscape while formally translating it. Hanley’s most recent paintings introduce another source of pattern: the shadows of clouds on the ploughed land, a further complication which adds to the beauty of his lines. Modest work, but of genuine achievement.

Pilar Ordovas continues to mount remarkable museum-quality shows in her Savile Row gallery. Currently you can see a small but choice selection of works by Paul Gauguin: just four pieces, all from private collections, but what a sense of originality inhabits the gallery through them. My favourite is ‘Jeune homme à la fleur’, painted in Tahiti in 1891, a portrait of a young man against a modulated blue ground with a flower behind his ear.