Painting Black and Pink

Adrian Heath, a pioneer of abstract art during the post-war period in Britain, produced the present work at a particularly successful point in his career. By the end of the 1950s, as Dr Alistair Grieve comments, ‘Heath had established his position as one of the leading painters of his generation, both in this country and abroad’ (Exhibition catalogue, Adrian Heath in the 1950s, London, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, 2005). He had three solo exhibitions at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1959, 1960 (the year in which he painted the present work) and 1962. Of the second of these Hanover shows, Jane Rye remarks: ‘the compressed energy of the earlier show seems to have exploded into more fluid, softer forms’ (J. Rye, Adrian Heath, Farnham, 2012, p. 144). From 1955 to 1976, he also taught at the Bath Academy of Art, alongside other celebrated artists including William Scott and Peter Lanyon.