Sir Terry Frost
Sir Terry Frost RA was an English abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall. Frost was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, colour and shape. He became a leading exponent of abstract art and a primary figure of the British art world of the latter half of the twentieth century. Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, in 1915, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. He left school aged fourteen and went to work in Coventry. During World War II, he served in France, the Middle East and Greece, before joining the Commandos. Whilst serving in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and sent to various prisoner of war camps. As a prisoner of war at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met Adrian Heath who encouraged him to paint. He later described those years as a ‘tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation’. As soon as the war was over he went to Birmingham College of Art, moving in the same year to Camberwell School of Art under Leonard Fuller. The following year, 1946, he relocated for a year to St. Ives School of Painting where his first solo exhibition was held in 1947 at G.R. Downing's bookshop, before returning to the Camberwell School of Art under Victor Passmore, Ben Nicholson and William Coldstream, with whose encouragement he showed his first abstract work in 1949. For three years he exhibited with the St. Ives Society of Artists, until in 1950 he was elected a member of the Penwith Society; he maintained a permanent connection with the Newlyn school. In the early 1950s he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. He was joined there by Roger Hilton, with whom he began a collaboration in collage and construction techniques. www.whytes.ie His first solo exhibition was in 1952 at the Leicester Galleries in London. Frost's academic career included teaching at Bath Academy of Art, the Coventry Art College and the University of Leeds School of Art, where he was the Gregory Fellow from 1954 to 1956. In 1958 while still teaching at Leeds he joined the London Group. In 1964 he was made Artist in Residence at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University and became a full time lecturer for the Department of Fine Art at Reading University in 1965. He became Professor of Painting at the University of Reading from 1977 to 1981. In 1992 he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 1998. In 1960 The Barbara Schaeffer Society in New York, hosted Frost's first exhibition in USA. There he met many of American Abstract Expressionists, including Marc Rothko who, along with his wife Mel, became great friends. Further solo exhibitions include the ICA, London (1971) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1976). A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1990, and a major retrospective, ‘Terry Frost: Six Decades’, was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2000. A major exhibition of his work commemorated the centenary of his birth in 2015 at The Tate St. Ives. Sir Terry Frost's work is held in many prestigious public, corporate and private collections throughout the world, including the Tate Gallery, the V&A, and the British Museum. www.whytes.ie
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'SUSPENDED FORMS TRIPTYCH [RED, BLUE AND YELLOW], 1982'
- Price Realised: €30,000
- Sale: 29 May 2017
- acrylic and collage on canvas; (3)
- 56 x 72in. (142.24 x 182.88cm)
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'UNTITLED ABSTRACT'
- Price Realised: €6,000
- Sale: 01 October 2018
- acrylic and collage on card
- 25 x 12½in. (63½ x 31¾cm)
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'UNTITLED ABSTRACT'
- Price Realised: €3,550
- Sale: 25 May 2020
- acrylic and collage on card
- 25 x 12½in. (63½ x 31¾cm)
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'LACED III, 1994'
- Price Realised: €600
- Sale: 17 July 2017
- screenprint laced with leather; (no. 80 from an edition of 100); (unframed)
- 10¼ x 21in. (26.04 x 53.34cm)
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'GREEN, YELLOW AND BLACK, 2002'
- Price Realised: €600
- Sale: 06 December 2008
- aquatint (no. 68 from an edition of 75)
- 38 by 39cm., 15 by 15.5in.
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'THREE STRIPES FOR RED, 2002'
- Price Realised: €600
- Sale: 06 December 2008
- etching with collage (no. 10 from an edition of 75)
- 24 by 24cm., 9.5 by 9.5in.