Winston Department obtained his OBE final 12 months in 2024, marking a long time of labor within the arts and his contribution to artwork within the UK. After shifting right here on the tender age of twelve, Department started his formal artwork training at The Slade (the place he was taught by artists together with Keith Vaughan, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow) earlier than embarking on a lifelong profession as an artist. His first solo exhibition passed off in 1967 at experimental area Arts Lab, which was additionally host to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and David Bowie.
In individual, Department is dapper and eloquent once we meet to talk after the opening of his new exhibition ‘Out of the Calabash’ at Goodman Gallery, London. In a return to very large-scale work, which he deserted shortly after leaving The Slade, Department is exhibiting a sequence of summary works that proceed to discover his decades-long investigation into mild and perspective via color and floor.
Winston Department, Untitled , 2025
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery. © Stephen White & Co)
He has lived all around the world, from California to Italy and Germany and says, ‘You’ve bought to go the place the climate fits your garments. If one thing isn’t working, you must decide it up and go some other place.’ That being stated Department, now 78, is again in London and again on Cork Road.
Though he began his profession as a figurative painter, he started to have a dialogue with historical past portray via color, which led him to start out working with abstraction. In his phrases, he needed to desert narrative, leaving solely color and light-weight to work with. ‘I needed to omit the narrative idea of portray and use the expressionistic ingredient of the luminosity of sunshine,’ he says.
The title of the exhibition, a reference to his Caribbean roots, reminds us that though Department got here to London as a baby, his roots are in a really completely different place. ‘Color is mild, and light-weight is feeling. Should you get out and stand on the street, relying on the sunshine, it is going to have an effect on your temper.’
Winston Department, Untitled, 2024
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery. © Stephen White & Co)
Winston Department, Untitled 2024
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery. © Stephen White & Co)
On this exhibition Department needs to envelop the viewer in color and light-weight, utilizing each the scale of the work and a technical use of color that create dimensions within the work. The colors he makes use of, from vibrant pinks to yellows and golds, to deep blues, inform their very own tales.
‘I don’t consider in wanting again as a result of it clouds the imaginative and prescient, however what I’ve realized is tips on how to give myself the construction to pursue my imaginative and prescient. I’m pursuing the eponymous nature of paint,’ Department explains. ‘You look into the portray. You felt that you simply had been embraced by the portray. You weren’t standing it, you had been enveloped in it.’
There’s something deeply conventional on this radically tutorial method to portray. Trying into the works, you’ll be able to see a Turner-esque use of yellow and a classical use of perspective. Previous to adopting abstraction in 1982, his work was impressed by iconography, however following this he took an interest within the ‘humanity of color’ stating that ‘mild is life’.
Out of the Calabash is on view at Goodman Gallery, London till 14th January 2026
goodman-gallery.com
Supply: Wallpaper
