Life enhancing

William Crozier at 80
Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 29 May

Agnes Martin
Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place, W1, until 22 May

William Crozier is Scottish born, but has lived much abroad, spending his formative years in Paris and Dublin, and later working in Spain and America, though always keeping a foothold in England. His sensibility is broadly European, perhaps influenced by the Scottish predisposition to plangent colour, and his work has an intellectual base and emotional breadth that sits easily in an international context. Step into the East End premises of Flowers and be prepared for a blaze of pure visual excitement and pleasure. The effect of this 80th birthday celebration is exhilarating.

Most of the work was done in the last three or four years, but the main ground-floor space in Shoreditch is dominated by an earlier painting entitled ‘Departure from the Island’ (1993). Larger than the rest, a glorious, zestful evocation of leaving land at sunset, with red and gold lashing the green sky and overspilling into the headlands, it highlights Crozier’s habitual and judicious use of black. Here is a splendid example of his mastery of radiant colour, with a wide expanse of brushy but depthless blue, rich vibrant yellow (over red) and jade foliage at bottom right. The shapes, too, have a combined identity that is precise and satisfying.

Crozier hones his subjects to their bare essentials: two leaf-like trees or a flower in a pot, playing off colours and patterns, such as the wonderful leopard-skin effect of ‘The Curtained Window’, or the maculate dabbing of ‘Morning, Kilcoe’ (both 2007), green on orange. A group of works on paper in watercolour and crayon, hung in the front gallery, are briskly composed around the weather and times of day — ‘Night Storm’, ‘Sunrise’, ‘The Last Light’.