Oldham Exhibition Saturday 17 May

[Dave Elliott]

         


© Oldham Council
Robert Lenkiewicz: Late Works
17 May - 20 August 2008

Robert Lenkiewicz was one of the most gifted and controversial artists of the 20th Century.

Throughout his career he was the subject of much speculation and controversy, which was focused as much on his personal life as on his work. He reacted against the styles and conventions of his time and, at a point when figurative painting was deeply unfashionable, he undertook a lifelong commitment to produce over 20 large scale projects examining fundamentally human issues.

Robert Lenkiewicz: Late Works – Observations on the Theme of the Double focuses on the artist’s Painter with Women series. Begun in the late 1980s and completed in 1994, this series examines the artist’s own personal relationships and puts forward the idea that love is a form of self obsession:

           ‘The painter looks into the mirror to paint himself; the lover looks into his lover to love himself’.

Two key ideas persist throughout Lenkiewicz’s work. The first is the isolation of the individual and our inability to know the minds or feelings of anyone else. The second is the sense of anxiety we experience in the face of inevitable death. He believed these factors drove people into various forms of obsessive behaviour including love, suicide, drug and alcohol addition.

Lenkiewicz himself displayed compulsive behaviour, amassing a library of over 25,000 books on topics such as psychology, metaphysics, the occult and sexual behaviour.  He was an equally obsessive painter, completing 21 large-scale projects over the course of his career.

Image: The Painter With Anna: Rear View, St Anthony Theme, by Robert Lenkiewicz, 1993.

Exhibition Launch: Saturday 17 May from 1pm. Nahem Shoa, a former pupil of Robert Lenkiewicz, will talk about Lenkiewicz's work at 1pm.

Lunchtime talk: Wednesday 11 June, 1pm, free.