JOHN LESSORE

09 October - 21 November 1999
Wolsey Art Gallery

This important exhibition brought together groups of pictures which had either been painted, or informed by John Lessore’s stays in East Anglia. For a number of years he had a studio on the Suffolk border. John Lessore paints from drawings of his initial observations and very often refers back to a single subject to produce a series of works. This exhibition was his first major one-person show in a regional gallery and included work from thirty years that has been collated from both national and international collectors and galleries.

John Lessore was born in 1939 in London and he studied at the Slade School of Art under Tom Monnington. He taught consistently throughout his career as a painter, including periods at the Norwich School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools. His work was regularly exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions and he had many successful shows in a number of London commercial galleries. John Lessore’s work has been selected for a variety of major exhibitions such as The Hard Won Image (Tate Gallery), The Pursuit of the Real: British Figurative Painting from Sickert to Bacon (Manchester City Museums, The Barbican and Glasgow City Art Gallery) and he is regularly shown amongst Britain’s most important figurative artists. His work is in collections at The Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Council, the Government Art Collection, the Norwich Castle Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, London and at the Tate Gallery, London.

This exhibition included works borrowed from the Arts Council Collection, the Tate Gallery and major private collectors in this country and the U.S.A.

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