Terry Setch

This is the first full-scale survey of the art and life of Terry Setch (b.1936), a British painter recognised internationally as one of the most consistently radical artists of his generation. It provides a critical structure and historical perspective with which to explore Setch's artistic production over fifty years. Setch first came to prominence in 1964 as a member of the short-lived 'Leicester Group', a loose collective of painters and sculptors whose work explored alternative ways of working to the traditional methods found in British art education. The group, whose members included Michael Sandle and Victor Newsome, stood for a pioneering attitude to new and non-art materials, and for forms of presentation that questioned the conventional distinctions between sculpture, painting, design and printmaking. Setch's large paintings in oil and encaustic made on unstretched sailcloth, which he made from the early 1970s, allegorised a threat to the well-being of man and nature from pollution and war, and from the threat of nuclear catastrophe. Setch has never ceased to experiment with new this experimentation has embraced constructing three-dimensional objects, the incorporation of found materials and detritus, mixing paints in unorthodox combinations of synthetic wax, using Styrofoam and polypropylene sheets as supports, and introducing plastics, chalk dust, heat and corrosive fluids to a very tactile process. Martin Holman's text considers Setch's work in terms of the themes that he has sustained over the course of his career, and the qualities that have made him admired by several generations of British artists. It places his art in the context of the work of his contemporaries (Michael Sandle, Patrick Caulfield, Julian Schnabel), the times in which the paintings were made and exhibited, and Setch's dialogue with Modernism, international art and history.