Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to exhibit five paintings by John Golding. These were painted in 1971 and were previously exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in the same year. The sixth painting, which completes the series, has recently entered the Tate Collection and will be exhibited at Tate Britain.
This group of large paintings, ranging between 10ft and 15ft long, were chosen to be exhibited in our gallery by John Golding, who died on 9 April 2012. In his mind they define the ‘working space’ and this was something that Golding felt was fundamental to each painting. Each painting ‘had to have the space to grow into and expand into’.
His early work was figurative and Golding noted at his show at Yale in 1989 that his transition in the early 1960s from figure paintings into abstraction was strongly marked by his admiration for Signorelli and Orozco, to colour field-style abstraction as a process of ‘moving…up and into the body imagery of my painting’.
Golding was born in England, educated in Mexico and Canada before returning to England to complete his research and teach both art history and painting. He was also well known as an art historian, teacher and curator, especially for his work on Picasso and Cubism, however it was for his painting that he wanted to be remembered.