Exhibition: Patrick Procktor - Art & Life @ Huddersfield Art Gallery

Patrick Procktor, Jimi Hendrix III, 1973. Photo c. Estate of the Artist and The Redfern Gallery, London.

Until 10th November 2012

Familiar with the name Patrick Procktor? We must confess that even at the BARS blog the name didn’t immediately ring a bell… and it’s precisely this kind of response that this current exhibition of Procktor’s work at the Huddersfield Art Gallery as part of ROTOR, a two-year series of exhibitions, public events and talks, seeks to challenge and change. During the 1960s Procktor was part of a suitably swinging circle that included such art luminaries as David Hockney and Ossie Clark, and the paintings on show here encompass eminently recognisable figures including Jimi Hendrix and filmmaker Derek Jarman. As the picture illustrating this post amply indicates, Procktor was a brilliantly deft watercolourist who excelled at portrait painting, and in his recent review of the show Independent critic Charles Darwent touches on the correspondences between Hockney and Procktor’s practices. In contrast to Hockney, however, the latter part of Procktor’s like was sadly marked by decline and tragedy – but this exhibition, together with the book by its curator Ian Massey entitled Patrick Proctor, Art and Life, should go some way to incorporating this intriguing figure back into the narrative of 1960s art in Britain.

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