Hundred Years Gallery has the pleasure to present a posthumous exhibition of paintings, prints, pots and sculpture by a talented artist Piers Sanders whose career was brought to a premature end by pancreatic cancer in October 2014 at the age of 55.
Private view on Thursday 4th of May from 6.30 to 9.30 as part of the First Thursdays Open until Late organised by Whitechapel Gallery
Piers grew up surrounded by art, his mother Paule Sanders was a noted sculptor. He trained as a painter at Camberwell College of Arts where contemporaries included actor Tim Roth, portrait painters Sarah Raphael (who also died tragically young in 2001) and Catherine Goodman who won the BP Portrait Award in 2002, and his lifelong friend Richard Lewsey who was selected for 2015 USIA Top Artist. He was the kind of student who went his own way rather than trying to please his tutors. In spite (or maybe because of) this, his work was included in ‘What They Showed’ 1982 – the best of the graduate work of that year.
It was Piers’ drypoint prints which attracted the most attention from leading figures in the art world when he exhibited in Kings Lynn. They display his skill and confidence as a draughtsman and have a wonderful texture. He would only take two or three prints from each plate because he said that after that the burr raised by the scriber became too flattened by the printing process. Etchings and aquatints are also on display.
He painted subjects that meant a lot to him: family portraits, landscapes in the Fens and in Suffolk, domestic objects. Piers’ portraits show unarguably what a talented painter he was.
His abstract paintings show the deep understanding of colour and form that he gained from many years of figurative painting and drawing. Viewers find themselves attempting to resolve them into natural objects, figures and buildings and they reveal new aspects at every fresh encounter.
One of his prints won first prize in Kings Lynn Open and Tate curator Judith Collins asked to see his work but, being uniquely Piers, he never followed it up. This exhibition is mounted by friends and family who feel he deserved more exposure.
Margaret Ranken
Saturday 6th May at 7:30pm
Death Positive Performance – Music, Dance and Poetry
A celebration of the life of artist Piers Sanders, featuring hard, fast physical theatre from MND Milk with Oliver Wrath and Liz Ranken of DV8 physical theatre company. Margaret Ranken, Piers’ Sanders partner of 17 years reads poems about his life and death alongside his work, and music comes from students at the Guildhall directed by Joseph Sanders.
