Hector McDonnell: Istanbul's Light

The exhibition has now extended to our Marlborough gallery. Visit thelittlegallery.co.uk using the button below. 

thelittlegallery.co.uk

In collaboration with Sule Gazioglu gallery.

Born in Belfast in 1947, McDonnell is one of Northern Ireland’s most distinctive painters, known for his atmospheric depictions of architecture, landscape and everyday life. Having studied in Munich and Vienna before reading Modern History at Oxford, his career has spanned London, Europe, Asia and America.

This exhibition brings together a selection of works celebrating McDonnell’s remarkable career and his enduring fascination with place, light and memory.

"Hector is a traditionalist in one respect and a thoroughly modern painter in another, and he is the richer for both. His interiors descend in a direct line from Lavery: the same ease with a lit room, the same instinct for the figure caught between one moment and the next. His stillness is Hopper's, and it is not fanciful to say that in Hector's pictures Lavery and Hopper meet. His palette has the Paul Henry blues, that cool clarity only an Irish eye seems able to mix. But what is entirely his own is the way the paint itself tells the story. The cobbles in a McDonnell have been walked on, and the bar has heard the conversation. He does not describe a place so much as record what has happened in it, and that is why people live with his pictures rather than merely own them."

Grant Ford. Chairman of Winsor Birch

Location

Gallery Eight, 8 Duke Street St James's, London  SW1Y 6BN