VENICE.- Defined as the Damien Hirst of his time, ACP - Palazzo Franchetti by Fondazione Calarota hosts the exhibition dedicated to Graham Sutherland, one of the greatest innovators of contemporary British painting. Curated by Roberta Perazzini Calarota, the show explores some of the artist's most cherished themes—nature, with its lush green landscapes and the animal world—through a selection of important oil paintings, watercolors, and meticulously chosen lithographs from the artist's most renowned cycles, including the famous "The Bestiary". Always balancing between reality and imagination, Sutherland’s enigmatic creations align with surrealism and immerse us in what Francesco Arcangeli described as a “magical unease,” characterized by allusive metamorphoses and the tension of opposing forces. These forces, in their perpetually unstable equilibrium, create a “mystery” whose resolution we will never know.
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Born in London in 1903, Graham Sutherland (1903–1980) stands out for his deeply personal reinterpretation of early 20th-century avant-garde movements and for his diverse use of mediums, including oils, watercolors, and lithographs, as well as costumes and set designs for theatrical performances. His art blends expressionist, cubist, surrealist, and abstract elements, merging them into a wholly original synthesis. The result is a figurative style that deconstructs forms into sophisticated fragments, only to reassemble them into a visionary and bittersweet new reality, captured in its continuous flux and the precarious tension of opposites: happiness and sadness, joy and horror, nature and introspection. His naturalistic impressions coexist with an existential dimension shaped by the tragic political landscape of his time, particularly the Second World War.
The works on display reveal the increasing emotional intensity Sutherland developed after an early phase of his career focused primarily on idyllic neo-romantic landscapes influenced by Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Most of the selected pieces represent significant examples of Sutherland’s mature style—from Twisted Tree (1973) to Road with Setting Sun (1977)—marked by a renewed approach to color influenced by the time he spent in southern France, as well as in Wales and Venice.
A portion of the exhibition is devoted to Sutherland’s graphic art, a technique he held dear and studied at Goldsmiths College, later teaching it at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to admire one of the artist’s most famous series: "The Bestiary", presented here in its entirety. Sutherland produced prints for two different bestiaries, in 1968 and 1979, to accompany Apollinaire's poetic compositions about animals. These works exemplify Arcangeli's theory that the formal reform Sutherland pursued is intrinsically linked to his quest for an escape from anguish, sought in the exploration of things and in hope. According to the artist himself, only by "paraphrasing" the world in his works could he express his feelings about reality.
Graham Sutherland is a widely institutionalized artist. He gained international acclaim during his lifetime: in 1946, he exhibited for the first time in New York at the Buchholz Gallery with Curt Valentin. In 1948, he showcased at London’s Hanover Gallery and returned to New York at Buchholz. In 1952, following his solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, he visited Italy, and the exhibition, expanded into a retrospective, was presented later that year at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Another retrospective organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953 traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1959, he held a solo exhibition in New York organized by Paul Rosenberg and Co. Additional exhibitions followed, including one at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1966, and shows at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1967. Among the most significant posthumous exhibitions are those at the Tate Gallery in 1982 and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2005.
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