Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 4

Graham Dean
Refugee from England ( Memories), 20th Century Contemporary Acrylic

1975

About the Item

Graham Dean 1975 Refugee from England ( Memories) Acrylic on canvas Image size: 47 x 41 inches Provenance Nicholas Treadwell Gallery This painting was reproduced internationally, it was in The Sunday Times colour supplement and featured on TV. The Artist Graham Dean was born in Birkenhead in 1951. He studied at the Laird School of Art in Birkenhead and the Faculty of Art and Design at Bristol Polytechnic. Dean began his artistic career as a book jacket illustrator in London, but his talent was soon spotted by the innovative Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, who championed his work.  Dean began painting in acrylics, which was very unusual at that time.  As he recalls ‘Acrylics then were the new big thing – they were American, all the realists and Pop artists used them, although British critics used to look down on them’. His satirical Post-pop images painted in a medium considered outlandish at the time perfectly caught the emerging diversity of culture and society in 1970’s Britain.  It is worth remembering that he was only in his twenties at the time, so ideally placed to recognise and reflect the social change that was happening all around him. During these formative years Dean was renting an attic studio in the house of the writer Jay Landesman, a Bohemian hubbub where conceivably anyone could turn up at any time.  Dean remembers the day musician Tom Waits did just that, and took the time to look at his paintings.  Dean was working on one of his most renowned paintings, The Pugilist, during this time – a perfect example of his urban realist style.  8 Duncan Terrace, a view of dustbins outside the Landesman residence, was used as part-payment of the rent, truly in the style of many struggling yet aspiring artists. Dean’s paintings from this time are intensely detailed, a direct result of his graphic design studies whilst at Bristol Poly.  Themes such as apartheid, skin disorders, intimacy and social division are explored. He used this realism to illustrate his perception of the changing world around him, sometimes with a very apparent underlying message. The figures, events and situations jump from painting to painting following through a thread of different events.  A detail from one becomes part of a larger narrative in an another. Works such as Refugee from England (Memories), Signpost and Camouflage, encapsulate an era that seems so familiar but yet so different from the present. Graham Dean now lives in Brighton.  The human body and condition still remain his subject, but his preferred medium now is watercolour.  His current works are more visceral, still depicting the presence of the human body in space although that space is now altogether less defined.  The urban realism of his early days has been replaced with an ethereal, more mysterious edge.
  • Creator:
    Graham Dean (1951, British)
  • Creation Year:
    1975
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 47 in (119.38 cm)Width: 41 in (104.14 cm)
  • More Editions & Sizes:
    1 of 1Price: $31,288
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    London, GB
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU5245703871
More From This SellerView All
  • Signpost, Contemporary British Artist, 1977
    By Graham Dean
    Located in London, GB
    Graham Dean 1977 Signpost Acrylic on canvas Image size: 78 x 50 inches The painting depicts a time before electronic travel boards, when train times were chalked on blackboards. The...
    Category

    1970s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Acrylic

  • This Side and That
    Located in London, GB
    Acrylic on canvas, signed and dated '1973' on verso Image size: 17 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches (44 x 29.5 cm) Contemporary style frame Exhibition label 'Royal Academy Exhibition 1973' on ve...
    Category

    1970s Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Acrylic

  • The Holy Family, 16th Century Venetian School, Oil on Canvas, Hand Carved Frame
    Located in London, GB
    Oil on canvas Image size: 26 x 37 inches (66 x 94 cm) Period hand carved gilt frame The pictorial arrangement of the Holy Family, with various saints in a landscape, was very popular in sixteenth-century Venice, following the prototype of Giovanni Bellini. Possibly intended for private devotion, this picture is a representative example of the compositional type known as the sacra conversazione...
    Category

    16th Century Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • The Rug Merchant, 19th Century Orientalist Oil Signed Oil Painting, 1879
    By Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner
    Located in London, GB
    Oil on canvas, signed and dated '1879' bottom right Image size: 38 x 59 1/2 inches (96.5 x 151 cm) Ornate Orientalist style gilt frame Carl Werner Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner wa...
    Category

    1870s Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • Summer in the City, Large Semi-Abstract 20th Century Oil Painting, Female Artist
    By Lena Gurr
    Located in London, GB
    Oil on canvas, signed lower left Image size: 50 x 34 inches (127 x 86.25 cm) Hand made contemporary style frame This colourful painting depicts a group of swimmers as they throw themselves from a pier, into a cooling nearby body of water. Gurr has forever captured this movement, freezing these bodies in the air, mid-jump, with a constant promise that they will soon splash through the surface of the water below. Although bold and clearly quite abstract in nature, the details of this artwork are charming - a small child sits on the pier, already wrapped in a towel after his own watery dip. Note too how the nearest diver holds their nose with one hand, in an attempt to stop the water going in as they submerge. Lena Gurr had a prolific career in which she painted landscape scenes and still lifes but her most noted works are ones such as these, showing everyday city scenes that were laced with social commentary. Indeed, Gurr's noted that her artwork always aimed to show "the joys and sorrows of everyday life." During the course of her career Gurr's compositions retained emotional content as they evolved from a naturalistic to a semi-abstract cubist style. Discussing this trend, she once told an interviewer that as her work tended toward increasing abstraction she believed it nonetheless "must have some kind of human depth to it." Lena Gurr  Lena Gurr, born in Brooklyn in 1897, studied at the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers, the Educational Alliance Art School, the Arts Students League with John Sloan, and with Maurice Sterne in Paris as well as in Mentone and Nice, France. Gurr was a member of the Artists League of America, the National Association of Women Artists, the New York Society of Women Artists, the Brooklyn Society of Artists, Audubon Artists and the American Artists Congress. She exhibited in numerous exhibitions held by these organizations as well as the Whitney Studio Club, National Academy of Design, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and the 1939 World's Fair. Her work is included in the collections of the Biro-Bidjan Museum, Russia and the Library of Congress, where she has been selected as a "Curator's Choice" in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. In addition to her career as a painter, lithographer and serigrapher, she also taught art in the New York City public school system. She had three solo exhibitions at the ACA Gallery in 1935, 1939 and 1945, and a retrospective in 1963. Notable among Gurr's colleagues - many of them WPA artists - were Mary Cecil Allen...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century Abstract Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

  • 'I Sleep but my Heart Waketh', 18th Century Italian School
    Located in London, GB
    Oil on canvas Image size: 12 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches (32.5 x 24.25 cm) Here, we see a sleeping putti lying underneath a set of trees, holding a ribbon. The text that can be seen on the scroll is from the Song of Solomon, chapter five, verse two; ' I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night'. This work was created after a well-known painting by the Spanish artist Alonso Cano...
    Category

    18th Century Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil

You May Also Like
  • Archaic Hercules Skinning a Rabbit - Contemporary, Sun, Rabbit, Red, Yellow
    By Alexandru Rădvan
    Located in Berlin, DE
    Archaic Hercules Skinning a Rabbit, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 53.14 H x 55.11 W in. 135 H x 140 W cm In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and his numerous far-ra...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Acrylic, Canvas

  • Gyre
    Located in Detroit, MI
    Gyre acrylic, spray paint on canvas 80" x 96" 2022 Part of the New Minority Series Dennis Jones was first introduced to the use of a bidet while being extremely ill in Hurghada, Egypt. He has played the game of ‘Jenga’ with prostitutes in Phuket, Thailand. Once he hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon from the North Rim and back in twelve hours. Jones has also visited fifty US National Parks. The work of Dennis Jones is growth oriented. There is diversity among his oeuvre and much risk in such an approach. Eschewing a ‘signature style’ that he considers to be boring, creatively limiting and market driven, he prefers to consider how method and expression intermingle and form a conceptual basis. A cursory glance may consider his prodigious output to lack focus, but a deeper reading reveals that he remains true to himself and allows his work to take him where it needs to go. There has always been the presence of a figure in his work, either implied, or directly visible. One can trace several years of development from his interest in figurative and cartoon-like imagery in, Toyland (2006), through his foray into text based work (2007-13) and a later influence of abstraction (2012-18). Following this trajectory brings one to his current body of work that combines figuration, cartoons and abstraction. He is a visual artist, educator, and architect. Each of the ‘hats’ he wears directly influence his work. He states that ‘a fascination with an integration of material, process and expression, truth of emotion and visually communicating thought are what sustain and drive him as an artist. Jones has participated in over seventy solo and group shows that include local, national and international venues. His creative output includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, videos, photos, books, teaching and residential architecture. Jones’ work was selected to be included in the New American Paintings 2019 Midwest Competition Publication, juried by Staci Boris, Associate Director of Exhibitions, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, his focus is on a growing body of paintings, in mixed media, on canvas that combine abstraction, figuration and cartoon imagery. Jones had a one person exhibition at the University of Michigan in September through December of 2018. A review of the show can be read on the page titled, Candyland Review. Earlier the same year, He curated an exhibition titled, SIX, that opened in January of 2018, at The Janice Charach Gallery; a five thousand square foot space, located in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The exhibition featured the work of six Detroit artists and provided adequate space for each to show a body of work…essentially six individual shows in one space. Selected venues that have shown Jones’ work include: The OK Harris Gallery, New York; Galerie Protege, NY; The Mary Washington Galleries, Mary Washington University, Fredericksburg, Maryland; The Kraft Lieberman Gallery, Chicago; The Drift Gallery, Portsmouth, NH; The Project Room, Lincoln, NE; The Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Canada; Artcite, Windsor, CA; The Thames Gallery, Chatham, Ontario, Canada; The Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, CA; Definitely Superior Gallery, Thunder Bay, ON, CA; Gallery Lambton, Sarnia, ON, CA, WKP Kennedy, North Bay...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Spray Paint, Acrylic

  • Rustics: Winter Hunting Lodge
    By Hannah Barrett
    Located in Boston, MA
    Hannah Barrett’s paintings imagine a colorful, absurdist world inhabited by eccentrics of ambiguous genders and time periods. With tongue-in-cheek nods to the past, Barrett combines...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

  • Rustics: Spring Weekenders
    By Hannah Barrett
    Located in Boston, MA
    Hannah Barrett’s paintings imagine a colorful, absurdist world inhabited by eccentrics of ambiguous genders and time periods. With tongue-in-cheek nods to the past, Barrett combines...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Oil, Acrylic

  • Neo Geology
    By Bruce Adams
    Located in Buffalo, NY
    Bruce Adams is best known as a conceptually based figurative painter who references various (often historical) painting styles. In exploring the act of painting, Adams peels back the...
    Category

    1980s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

    Materials

    Acrylic, Canvas

  • 'Russian Invasion' HUGE Original Painting on Canvas by Artist Fahri Aldin- 1950
    By Fahri Aldin
    Located in Belleville, CA
    A Stunning, huge, Original painting on canvas by Canadian artist Fahri Aldin. This One of a Kind Masterpiece measures an impressive 64 inches in height and 172 inches wide or 163 x ...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas, Paint, Coating, Varnish, Cotton Canvas, Mixed Media, Acrylic

Recently Viewed

View All