CONTEMPORARY: Ann Gardner 

*Please see the Events page for images and details from Ann last solo show 'Le Terroir'*

From her beginnings as a fast-track eighteen year old admitted to the Slade, Ann Gardner has come at her subjects with a highly distinctive energy and sense of purpose: her touch is characteristically bold, brisk and buoyant. Ann is known for her portraits and has twice been shortlisted for the BP Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Ann's 2008 solo show “Le Terroir” featured a body of work which concentrates on the landscape near her home base in La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, just north of Tours. Tracking the knots of housing seen from her window, she observes the townscape strangely, almost unaccountably upended in the Loir. The most substantial of these views, Le Loir No. 1, a six-months' studio labour, runs top to base from a dense impacted wood to a shimmery floating sky reflected in Le Loir. And thus, in this art with its French antecedents, the solidity of Cézanne's vision and the atmospherics of Monet's meet up in a novel conjunction.

Most strikingly, the sense of place that is the consistent interest driving all these images is expressed through bold gestural metaphors, rather than through descriptive drawing. Two recent canvases The Forest of Bercé and Rain in Brittany mark the point where a painter who started out with enormous precocious promise reemerges as an outstanding visual poet. (Julian Bell, 2008)

Prices from £ 1,000 - £ 6,500 for oils; £ 750 - £ 1,000 for watercolours.