Gerald Laing

From 19 September - 13 October, The Fine Art Society will stage the first posthumous retrospective of British Pop artist and sculptor Gerald Laing (1936 - 2011). Featuring nearly 60 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition will trace the entire career of the artist, from the '60s Pop Art he produced in London and New York, to the bronze sculptures he created at his studio at Kinkell Castle in the Scottish Highlands, and finally, his return to the Pop idiom during his later years with a series of paintings criticising the Iraq War and portraits of celebrities including Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse. The exhibition will also coincide with the publication of the Catalogue Raisonné by the Artist's estate.

Gerald Laing is one of the few pop artists to cross both the UK and US movements. He helped to define the visual language of the 1960s with huge canvases based on newspaper photographs of famous models, astronauts and film stars. His most famous work, Brigitte Bardot (1962), has become an icon of the decade.

The Fine Art Society’s exhibition will reflect all phases of Laing’s career starting from the early pop paintings he produced while he was still a student at St Martins School of Art in London in the 1960s including a monumental portrait of French film star and wife of director Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina.

Following a move to New York City in 1964, Laing was introduced to American pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and began to exhibit widely. Here, Laing continued to paint large-scale canvases capturing the excitement and exuberance of America in the Sixties. Always politically aware, Laing often imbued his paintings with critical overtones such as in Lincoln Convertible (1964), a controversial depiction of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Sculpture would become the central focus of Gerald Laing’s practice for the next forty years. By 1969, disillusionment with the American Dream led him to move from New York City to the Scotland Highlands, where he purchased and restored the 16th-century Kinkell Castle and established a bronze foundry. His initial experimentation with abstract metal sculpture in the late 1960s evolved into figurative sculpture with a series of bronze sculptures of his second wife, Galina.

Gerald Laing returned to painting in 2004 with a body of work forcibly criticising the Iraq War. Having served in the British Army for ten years during the 1950s, Laing was one of a very few artists of his generation to have served in the armed forces. Encouraged by the positive critical reception of his war paintings, Laing continued to paint into his final years, returning to the theme of celebrity and pop culture with studies of Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham and Amy Winehouse.

Today, Laing’s work is in public and private collections around the world, including at the Tate, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery in London; and in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, New York, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Gerald Laing was represented by The Fine Art Society from the 1990s until his death in 2011 and the gallery held exhibitions of his work in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2008. Director Gordon Cooke commented:

“The gallery is the perfect place to celebrate Laing’s incredible body of work. The Fine Art Society were proud to represent him from the 1990’s until his death and held four major exhibitions during his lifetime.”