The exhibition unfolds the remarkable story of the Abbey Art Centre, a cosmopolitan art colony established at New Barnet in 1946 by charismatic artist, gallerist and world art collector, William Ohly (1883–1955). A crucible of creativity on London’s northern edge, the Abbey was a postwar haven for stateless Jewish refugees, as well as artists from Australia, Britain and continental Europe. Ohly’s openness to outsiders extended to his dealings at the Berkeley Galleries in Mayfair, which opened in late 1941 during the Blitz and where Abbey artists occasionally exhibited, as well as Commonwealth artists and artists from Ohly’s own world art collection. The Abbey was an important seeding bed for cross-cultural and transnational modernism that proved pivotal to the careers of many artists, as they navigated the seismic political and cultural shifts taking place in the postwar and postcolonial artistic landscape in Britain and beyond.
Featuring paintings, sculpture, drawings, monotypes, lithographs, puppets and related photographs, the exhibition includes artworks by Abbey residents Scottish painter Alan Davie, English sculptor Peter King, English painter Lilian Colbourn, German émigrés: sculptors Inge King and Gudrun Krüger, pioneering animator Lotte Reiniger, and painters and printmakers Marcel Frishman, Margret Kroch-Frishman and William Ohly, Austrians Helen Grünwald and Angela Varga, Ukrainian painter Stacha Halpern, Australian constructivist Robert Klippel and painters James Cant and Mary Webb. Narrative sub-themes include the impact of African and Indigenous Australian art on emerging artists and socially conscious painter-printmakers working in London’s East End.
The exhibition also features a small number of artists associated with the Berkeley Galleries including Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu, German sculptor Fred Kormis and Prussian-born graphic artist Katerina Wilczynski, as well as related photographs, books and archival materials.
