International Artist Alan Rankle curates a limited selection from artists including, Claudia De Grandi, Stephen Newton, Matthew Radford, Suzie Zamit as well as a selection of his own artwork. This exhibition will be showing at the gallery until March 26th.

“In the Autumn of 1999 I visited an exhibition which included Auguste Rodin sculptures from the Cantor Collection at the Nassau County Museum where an inspired curator had juxtaposed some of Rodin’s small bronze figure studies alongside similar sized bronze studies by Willem de Kooning from around a century later.

These sculptures were similarly finished in black patinated bronze which gave a sympathetic aesthetic aspect to the singularly visceral physical qualities they shared.

The erotic figures by Rodin modelled finely with edges of a working velocity, seemed to convey a previous incarnation to the abstracted forms of de Kooning ripped and fingered into pulsating shifting shapes..

Speaking with the sculptor Suzie Zamit about my ideas for an exhibition I mentioned how I’d been intrigued about the similar way these two artists had worked on studies and how a rough study captures the essence of the artist’s vision. She said, we’re talking about the mystery of the unfinished, and we realised we had a title.

Yet this title embodies not only the ‘unfinished’ aspect of such studies and sketches, resonant as they are with the essential brio and panache of an artist’s ideas, often more succinctly than ‘finished’ works. John Constable’s full sized rough studies are commonly considered to compare favourably with his exhibited paintings, and the insightful watercolours and drawings by Andrew Wyeth have an authority well beyond his meticulously completed temperas. Just as in the case of the conceptual evolution from Rodin to de Kooning, it’s relative to the dialogue an artist has with influential mentors from the past, and their own influence on artists of the future.

The dialogue of art itself is the mystery of the unfinished”.

Alan Rankle 2023

Examples of the artist’s work below, for specific pieces available to purchase, please visit the store.