Hugh Beattie – London: Ancient & Modern

London Ancient & Modern brings together 30 new compositionally intricate paintings by artist Hugh Beattie depicting entirely new views of London’s skyline. Studied at close hand, the works crystallise the vast gulf between the stone heritage of London and the new architecture of glass.

Over 70% of the City of London’s buildings have been erected since the millennium; in Beattie’s canvases, Early Medieval buildings share the cityscape with towering Modernist flats and our streets proudly display hundreds and even thousands of years of history.

Taking solitary early morning walks through London, Beattie seeks to discover hidden parts of London and investigate why monuments are so special and sometimes so vulnerable

Art historian Ayla Lepine comments, Beattie reveals the intensity of London’s urban pace afresh, distilling it through inventive brushstrokes, high-key light, and provocative architectural and environmental pairings. Beattie’s artworks suggest traces of people, focusing on buildings as a kind of urban collective portraiture. In doing so, his paintings form a sophisticated argument that London’s history truly is a shared endeavour, ours to protect and – sadly all too often – ours to destroy.

Lepine goes on to note, Paradoxically, Beattie’s sharp attention to surface qualities – the sheen of steel, and the ruddy texture of brick – invites viewers to probe the ideas that churn beneath the glass and stone, to get to the heart of what is in fact absent in so many of his paintings: the people who design, craft, support, and visit these places. Beattie reveals London as it was, as it is, and as even as it could be, if we seize opportunities to treat the city’s historic architecture with care.

Beattie isolates clean crisp architectural features that at first glance may go unnoticed. The viewer is encouraged to look at contemporary London afresh and asks how we will go about saving its architectural treasures. Loving London is not just enough. The artist coaxes us into an awareness of the beauty of contemporary London, through the phenomenal contrast of building design, finding details of the urban environment to which we are so often oblivious.