Caught by the River

Random Spectacular at the Fry Gallery

8th March 2020

Purveyors of many things beautiful St Judes have announced a collaborative exhibition at Essex’s Fry Gallery, opening 5 April.

From the St Judes website:

“Artists held within the collection of The Fry Art Gallery have inspired many of the printmakers, painters and designers that we work with, and in recent years we’ve had the pleasure of reissuing wallpapers by Edward Bawden and Sheila Robinson as part of our St Jude’s Studio Archive range.

So it’s a great honour to share news of Random Spectacular at The Fry Art Gallery, a collaborative exhibition with an accompanying printed journal.

The title of The Fry Art Gallery’s main exhibition for 2020 (which runs from 5 April to 25 October) promises an unusual mix of work from the permanent Collection, much of which has not been shown in recent years, or in the case of more recent acquisitions, this will be their first showing. The exhibition is not thematic and the eclectic selection of work has been largely curated by over forty individuals from various aspects of the arts world including visual arts, music, theatre, writing and design. Selectors include Angie Lewin, Jeff Fisher, Mark Hearld, Margaret Howell, Jake Tilson, Alex Jennings, Emily Sutton, Jonny Hannah, Eleanor Pritchard, Christopher Brown, Ed Kluz, Alan Powers, Rob Ryan and David Gentleman.

The North West Essex Collection comprises over 3000 works by artists principally from Great Bardfield, Saffron Walden and nearby villages and includes Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Sheila Robinson, Marianne Straub, Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun and Isabel Lambert. There will be work on show by these artists and many more, but also books, ceramics, design, and artefacts from their lives – scrapbooks, letters, sketchbooks, diaries and ephemera.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a collaborative visual and literary journal of the same title designed by Brian Webb. This will be published by our imprint Random Spectacular, with all profits from the book being donated to the Fry Art Gallery Building Fund.”

You can register early interest in the exhibition journal here. More information about the exhibition is available here.