Details
8 December 2021 - 27 March 2022
Two new exhibitions across our Upper, Tall and Sunken Galleries
Click Book Now to pre-book your ticket for both exhibitions
Alfred Wallis: Artist & Mariner
Tall & Sunken Galleries
Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) was a mariner and scrap merchant born in Devonport, Plymouth, who spent most of his life in Cornwall. He started painting around the age of seventy, with no formal training and little income. Despite these challenges, his artistic output was prolific.
After going to sea as a cabin boy at the age of nine, Wallis spent his early life working on lugger and deep-sea fishing boats off the Cornish coast and in the Atlantic. He later set up a marine scrap store in St Ives. Following the death of his wife, he turned to making art as a creative release from the loneliness he felt.
Whilst visiting St Ives in 1928, the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood encountered Wallis painting in his cottage. He was surrounded by artworks that he had pinned to the walls with large nails, still visible in some of the works. Nicholson and Wood were drawn to the freshness of Wallis’ approach: disregarding rules of scale and perspective, and painting memories and experiences, rather than from life.
A year later, Nicholson arranged for Wallis’ paintings to be included in an avant-garde group exhibition organised by the Seven and Five Society in London. He also introduced Wallis’ work to Jim Ede, a Tate curator who later created Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Ede quickly purchased his first Wallis and a lively letter correspondence with the artist ensued, lasting from 1929 to 1939. Kettle’s Yard’s collection was built upon their close friendship and contains over one hundred works, a significant number of which are displayed in this exhibition.
Part of what makes Wallis’ work so distinctive is his use of unconventional materials. Working with a limited palette of boat or household paints, he would recycle pieces of cardboard, often from the local greengrocer, allowing the irregular shapes to dictate the composition and leaving areas bare to reveal the colour and texture of the cardboard. In spite of this, Wallis was able to manipulate his materials to achieve a variety of expressive effects, from lively impasto brushwork to convey the churning waves of the stormy sea, to delicate and precise line drawings that illustrate ships and boats with an almost diagrammatic accuracy.
As well as providing respite from the loneliness he felt after the death of his wife, Wallis used painting as a nostalgic outlet, expressing his love for the ships and boats of his youth. Many of his works depict places and scenes from an earlier era – ‘what used to be’ – featuring the types of people and vessels he would have encountered during his long career at sea and in St Ives. Brigantines and barques with magnificent sails and figureheads are illustrated in meticulous detail, conjuring the relics of a lost age. Wallis had direct experience of sailing on these larger vessels, working as a merchant sailor and undertaking Atlantic voyages as a young man.
In the summer of 1941, Wallis’ friend, the art critic Adrian Stokes, arranged for him to be cared for at the Madron Institute, a workhouse in Penzance, owing to the artist’s deteriorating health.
Ben Nicholson wrote to Jim Ede on the day of Wallis’ death in 1942, ‘I don’t think a good Wallis is representational, it is simply REAL?’ Since his death, Wallis’ paintings have entered public collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Wallis rarely strayed from St Ives, but as Jim Ede remarked, recognising the universal spirit of his paintings, ‘Wallis is never local’.
All works in the exhibition are by Alfred Wallis and from the collection of Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge.
Ronnie Hughes: Isobar
Upper Gallery
Ronnie Hughes is one of Ireland’s most dynamic abstract painters. Hughes’ elegant and poised works are executed with complex technical skill yet retain a lightness of touch. While his finished paintings display a diversity of styles, at heart they share a common concern with the lived experience, and what Hughes has described as “the beauty, the fragility and the violence of being.”
Ronnie Hughes’ works evolve over a long time and are generally process-driven to the extent that there is no plan or, in most cases, any sense of the outcome until the works are close to completion. “My role is to steer and nuance their evolution; to balance the elements and, just as often, to disrupt them resulting in the emergence of waves, nebulae, constellations, lattice structures and fields”.
In recent years Hughes’ work has become more ‘optically’ charged, colour and shape are presented as vibrational energies where the haptic qualities that a painting’s surface contains and its ability to record, hold and represent time are amplified.
Hughes’ work is complex and multi-dimensional. The painted surface is constructed through a layering of stratas revealing a range of associative and representational qualities simultaneously. What appears to be random or chaotic is revealed to have a hidden template, structure or pattern, the regimented order of which is constantly gnawed at and undermined.
“I’m interested in exposing these unseen forces, the things that lie beneath appearance. The physical act of making a painting is for me an act of discovery, a quest to extract a veiled or hidden reality. I try to make paintings that reward careful looking and that encourage contemplation”.
The safety of our visitors and staff is a top priority, so to help us manage the number of people in the MAC at any one time, we advise you to pre-book your gallery visit.
Booking your gallery visit
Click the green Book Now button above and select the date and time you wish to visit this exhibition. These are listed as 30 min slots, and you can arrive at the MAC anytime within that 30min time slot. Next tell us how many will be attending – our exhibitions are free to visit, but you can choose to add a donation to your booking. At this difficult time, we are more grateful than ever for those who give financially towards our work – your donations truly make a difference.
To complete your booking, we’ll ask you for some personal details including a contact telephone number for Track and Trace purposes. Once your booking is confirmed, we will send you a confirmation email, and the day before your visit, we’ll also send an email with some helpful information for your visit.
On the day of your visit
We have introduced a one-way system at the MAC, as part of our efforts to keep you safe. On arrival, please enter via the door from Exchange Street West and head to Box Office.
Please show your e-ticket or print at home ticket, and our staff will check you in and share some further information with you about your visit. You'll be asked for the names and contact details of all members of your party for Track and Trace purposes.
For more information to help prepare you for a visit to the MAC, check out our Keeping You Safe page. There you’ll find a customer journey video, showing you how your visit might look, and answers to our frequently asked questions.
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