The auction will include a number of late 20th-century works from artists such as Patrick Caulfield, John Piper, Patrick Hughes, Peter Howson and Tai-Shan Schierenberg. There will also be a collection of pottery from the likes of David Leach, John Turner, Michael Cardrew and Joanna Constantinidis.
Tai-Shan is an artist born in England in 1962. He primarily works with portraits and has several pieces hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. He also executed the commission for a double portrait of the Royal Couple, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, in 1997.
However, the painting to be sold at Dawson’s is not a portrait but a landscape. This is his 1993 Old Tower - Rain, which depicts just that: a tower in the rain, next to it a tree with grey skies above. At first glance, one can hardly distinguish the motif – the painting is impressionistic on the verge of abstraction.
Patrick Caulfield was an English artist and printmaker heavily associated with the Pop Art movement. Born in 1936, he studied at both the Chelsea School of Art and at the Royal College of Art. He was a contemporary of David Hockney and Allen Jones.
For sale at Dawson’s is his Oh Helen, I Roam My Room – a silkscreen in colours of blue, yellow and black. The silkscreen strongly exemplifies Caulfield’s graphic style, flat planes of colour and cartoon-like black contours, creating a very sharp two-dimensional impression.
Patrick Hughes is a British artist born in 1939. He is the creator of ‘reverspective’ and optical illusion: a reversed perspective on a three-dimensional surface, where the parts of the picture that seems farthest away are actually physically the nearest.
At Dawson’s Hughes is represented with Outdoors, a 1998 lithograph. The work is signed and numbered 22/35.
Turning to the pottery part of the auction, we have to mention Joanna Constantinidis. She was a successful cermicist born in York in 1927. She lectured at Chelmsford Technical College and School of Art, teaching there for nearly 40 years.
She retired in 1989 to be able to fully concentrate on creating her ceramics. Her pieces are internationally recognised and have been exhibited in the United States, Belgium, Germany and Italy – and of course in the United Kingdom.
She was highly influenced by British history, medieval pottery and early industry pottery. Another great inspiration was modern and ancient Greece, which is shown in the sun-bronzed metal and the minimalist shapes of her ceramics.
At Dawson’s you will be able to find a small 1970s Joanna Constantinidis stoneware pottery vase with an egg-shaped body and a textured speckled glaze.
