Alex Lowery lives and works in Charmouth, Dorset.

Art First Gallery, Cork Street, London
Sladers Yard Gallery, West Bay

Alex Lowery was born in London in 1957. He studied at Bath Academy of Art for his foundation year and subsequently at the Sir John Cass School of Art (1978-9) and the Central School of Art (1979-82). His first London exhibition was held at the Rocket Gallery in 1995 and had his first solo exhibition with Art First in Dec 2000. He now lives and works in Dorset.

Flattened spaces, simplified forms, heightened colours, a compelling formal precision and painterly subtleties, these are the characteristics which attach themselves to Alex Lowery's work and to the work of the American realists, Alex Katz and Edward Hopper, whose influence Lowery acknowledges. However, as the critic, David Cohen, commented there is also a surprising analogy to be made between Lowery and the Italian Futurist artist, De Chirico. “West Bay has…become something quite marvellous in Lowery's hands, like De Chirico's Ferrara, an actual place, but every bit as unreal as an invented city… the town has been transformed quite simply, by being rendered as form.

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Alex Lowery continues to mine and develop landscape subjects close at hand where he lives in west Dorset, with the singular harbour of West Bay providing a kind of stylistic touchstone, against which newer motifs can be tried and tested. Among these more recent subjects are the very different challenges presented by semi-industrial Portland, and a patch of gorse strewn heathland.

Using his eye for the inner qualities latent in ordinary experience, his method involves the paring away of extraneous detail, with the aim of leaving a luminous simplicity; the subject is refashioned, fused into painted images charged with an understated poetry.

Welcome to the seaside of dreams
By Sara Hudston

Alex Lowery's allusive paintings of West Bay in Dorset reveal the English seaside to be a place on the metaphorical edge, a location where mundane man-made objects meet the primal space of sea and sky.

Bare of figures and cleansed of cars, boats and other moveable appurtenances of everyday life, Lowery's discretely abstracted landscapes emanate an intense emotional aura. His West Bay is a place we can all recognise, an unlovely, rather downbeat, essentially urban collection of buildings, roads and street furniture somehow transformed by the luminosity of light and water into a beautiful and unsettling private world.

Lowery has spent more than a decade painting West Bay and his re-imagining of this putative resort can be seen as a quest to capture its unique essence of place. His evocative paintings are not direct observations of actual locations, but scenes from an interior landscape. His method is essentially one of reduction and distillation; over the years the work has become barer and emptier as he pares away extraneous detail.

The results emphasise an existential isolation of self. Lowery's paintings communicate a dreamlike feeling of disorientation akin to being alone on an abandoned film set after the action has finished and the crew has packed up and gone home. Life is elsewhere, perhaps just beyond the edge of the picture.

Resolutely modernist, these paintings exhibit a confident belief in the cool purity of line and form. Lowery wryly employs a restrained repertoire of geometric shapes as painterly motifs. Rows of chimney pots echo crenulated wall tops; poles and signs become enigmatic symbols that function both as observed objects and aesthetic flourishes.

Using oil paint over a charcoal outline Lowery produces an understated, yet finely calculated paint surface, enabling him to make subtle use of chromatic effects. The paint varies in opacity, in places floating thinly over the grain of the canvas, in others filling the surface with deceptive restraint.

The apparent simplicity of Lowery's painting concentrates its metaphorical possibilities. By depicting the finite borders of reality - the end of the road, the level horizon between sea and sky, the banality of buildings - he leads us to the edge and invites us to make an imaginative leap into the infinite.

Alex Lowery
West Bay - New Paintings at Art First, Cork Street
28 November - 22 December 2000

West Bay, near Bridport in Dorset has long been the resort of artists. Paul Nash was a frequent visitor when living locally and in 1934, the surrealist, Eileen Agar rented a cottage there for the summer. It is a small English port of singular visual contrasts, which embeds itself mysteriously in the mind. Certainly this has been its effect on Alex Lowery, who has been painting West Bay for the last eight years.

"I have written elsewhere of my being 'attracted by the elusive nature of the place - the diminutive cliffs abutting E. S. Prior's outsize apartment block that perches on the harbour edge, the white mast, the pink house built on the shingle' - there seemed to be an equation on offer and one that called for some kind of acknowledgement. This acknowledgement has taken the form of an attempt to evolve a style which suppresses detail in favour of that which seems (to me) essential... I hope that by focusing-in on whatever the mystery of the place is, it becomes not less elusive, but paradoxically more so."

Alex Lowery (b. 1957)