Three artists who were in the same year at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in the early 1960s, and who all helped revolutionise British art, have shows in London this month.
Early works by Neil Stokoe, including some painted during his time at the RCA, are due to go on show at Redfern Gallery, through the dealer Megan Piper, on 16 June (until 5 July). Many of the works have not been seen in public before as Stokoe, who was born in County Durham in 1935 and gained a place at the RCA in 1959, painted in anonymity until 2000.
A survey of works by the Ohio-born artist R.B Kitaj, who studied at the RCA from 1959 to 1961, opens at Marlborough Fine Art on 10 June (until 11th July). The exhibition includes 40 works painted between the 1950s and 2007, the year the artist died. Kitaj’s first one-man exhibition was also held at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963.
Meanwhile, Kitaj’s close friend David Hockney, who graduated from the RCA in 1962 with the gold medal for painting, having originally being refused his diploma, has an exhibition of recent paintings and photographs at Annely Juda Fine Art (until 27 June). The exhibition is an exploration of Hockney’s lifelong interest in perspective. The canvases, painted in the artist’s Los Angeles studio over the past two years, include a series of group portraits of his friends playing cards.
