Victor Willing : visions /
McEwen, John,writer of supplementary textual content.
Howarth, Victoria,writer of supplementary textual content.
Gilmore, Elizabeth,writer of supplementary textual content.
Willing, Victor,1928-1988.Works.Selections.
Hastings Contemporary (Hastings, England),host institution.
Victor Willing established his reputation as a painter while still a student at the Slade School of Art in London in the early 1950s. In 1955, just one year after graduating, he was the talk of the town, when he secured a solo exhibition at the prestigious Hanover Gallery, and important private and institutional collectors competed to buy his work. Recognizing Willing's original talent, intellect, and status among his contemporaries, the influential art critic David Sylvester described him as the ?spokesman of his generation?. Soon after, Willing left England to live in Portugal with fellow Slade alumnus and wife-to-be Paula Rego. The following two decades represented a period of creative block and personal setbacks. Willing struggled to produce new work, while Rego's career blossomed. In 1966, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that would lead to paralysis. In the mid-1970s, the family moved back to London and Willing returned to painting. Over the next ten years, he found acclaim once again, in particular for his dreamlike and hallucinatory imagery inspired by visions, as well as a personal iconography that in its childlike forms reached towards a new language of figuration. Published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, this volume is the first monograph in two decades on this brilliant, ground-breaking, but overlooked painter, who has been described by Nicholas Serota as someone who burned the brightest in a bright generation, and whose paintings continue to demonstrate that this was no shooting star, but rather a fiery comet which would eventually guide us all. Exhibition: The Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, U.K. (19.10.2019 -05.01.2020).
Catalogue of an exhibition held at Hastings Contemporary 19 October 2019-5 January 2020.
Includes bibliographical references.
Victor Willing established his reputation as a painter while still a student at the Slade School of Art in London in the early 1950s. In 1955, just one year after graduating, he was the talk of the town, when he secured a solo exhibition at the prestigious Hanover Gallery, and important private and institutional collectors competed to buy his work. Recognizing Willing's original talent, intellect, and status among his contemporaries, the influential art critic David Sylvester described him as the ?spokesman of his generation?. Soon after, Willing left England to live in Portugal with fellow Slade alumnus and wife-to-be Paula Rego. The following two decades represented a period of creative block and personal setbacks. Willing struggled to produce new work, while Rego's career blossomed. In 1966, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that would lead to paralysis. In the mid-1970s, the family moved back to London and Willing returned to painting. Over the next ten years, he found acclaim once again, in particular for his dreamlike and hallucinatory imagery inspired by visions, as well as a personal iconography that in its childlike forms reached towards a new language of figuration. Published to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, this volume is the first monograph in two decades on this brilliant, ground-breaking, but overlooked painter, who has been described by Nicholas Serota as someone who burned the brightest in a bright generation, and whose paintings continue to demonstrate that this was no shooting star, but rather a fiery comet which would eventually guide us all. Exhibition: The Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, U.K. (19.10.2019 -05.01.2020).
Willing, Victor, 1928-1988
Willing, Victor, 1928-1988.