05/01/16
Interview: Paul Huxley
Trained at Harrow College of Art
and the Royal Academy Schools in the 1950s, Paul Huxley (b1938) grew up
immersed in American culture and art. The US was then still an expensive
destination, to which few people travelled, and Huxley smiles as he remembers
how unreal it all felt. Then, in 1964, he won a Stuyvesant travel award and
found himself in New York, with the then curator of the Whitechapel Gallery,
Bryan Robertson, who introduced him to the likes of Robert Motherwell and Lee
Krasner.
Returning for two further years on
a Harkness fellowship, Huxley was able to realise his ambitions of working on a
large scale, creating abstract paintings and developing his vocabulary of
shapes and gestures. After Huxley was included in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition
of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1967 and a Museum of Modern Art
travelling exhibition in 1968, the Kornblee Gallery in New York mounted two
solo exhibitions of his work in 1967 and 1970. Since then, he has been based in
London, and his forthcoming exhibition at David Richard Gallery, Santa Fé, New
Mexico, will be his first stateside solo show in nearly 40 years.
Watch the interview here