Anthony Amies: Breaking Waves

The Lost Landscapes of England

Anthony Amies’ paintings assert a classical conception of painting. From the mid 1970s, the British artis pursued a radical counter-concept to the art of his time with a stylistically peculiar landscape painting. They are calm and enigmatic pictures that do without any scandal. In large-scale drawings and oil paintings, he plays with the “blot” technique: Amies abstracts the landscapes to convey an idea rather than a realistic image. The reduction to land and sea is a reflection on England and the loss of its individual landscapes to the monotony of industrial and urban proliferation and sprawling housing estates. In this idiosyncrasy - the assertion of the genre of landscape painting and in the painterly quality of the works as a contribution to the assertion of painting in art - lies the importance of this English painter.