Philip Hicks 1928 - 2021 Paintings from the Artist's Estate

David Messum Fine Art will present an exhibition of paintings from the Studio Estate of the late Philip Hicks (1928 - 2021), to be held at 12 Bury Street, St. James’s from 10th January - 2nd February 2024.

Philip Hicks, who died on 12 June 2021 at the age of ninety-two, was described by The Times critic and author John Russell Taylor as ‘a brilliant draughtsman’ and ‘an outstanding colourist ... Hicks’s art delights for many complex reasons and two very simple ones: that it is beautiful to behold, and above all that it says Yes to life, finding in the most ordinary and everyday something rich and strange, and wholly personal.’

This exhibition of late works, taken from artist’s studio, demonstrates Hicks’s retrospective vision in later life. His paintings from the mid-1980s onwards increasingly included rural motifs for which he would become best known, and which looked back to his early life growing up in the English countryside: sheep, fish, trees, birds, butterflies, boats and the circles of the sun and the moon, often settled in fields of carefully considered colour. In 2009 he explained how he grew ‘very fond’ of sheep, ’as creatures, as characters, which they are, and the paintings which resulted had a high degree of loose reality which hid the abstraction involved in the colour and placing of the images.’