William Crozier (Irish artist)

William Crozier (born 1930 in Glasgow) is a contemporary Irish-Scots still-life and landscape artist currently based in London.

Life and works

Crozier was born in Glasgow in 1930 of Irish parents and educated at the Glasgow School of Art between 1949 and 1953. On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London where he quickly gained a reputation as the 1950s equivalent of a Young British Artist through the early success and notoriety of his exhibitions of assemblages and paintings at the ICA, Drian and the Arthur Tooth galleries, with whom he had a long association. [http://www.dcu.ie/arts/33.htm]

Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier allied himself and his work consciously with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, rather than with the New York abstractionists, who were more fashionable in the UK at the time. He was also part of the artistic and literary world of 1950s Soho, a close associate of ‘the Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and William Scott, and part of the expatriate middle-European and Irish intellectual circles in London of the time. Crozier spent 1963 in southern Spain with the Irish poet Anthony Cronin; this proved pivotal to Crozier's development as an artist. On his return to the UK, he began a series of skeletal paintings which anticipated the ‘New Expressionist’ German painters of the 1980s, and which were influenced by Crozier's visits to Auschwitz and Belsen Based in London throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Crozier exhibited his works in London, Glasgow, Dublin and all over Europe. As many artists of the 1960s did, Crozier combined painting with teaching, first at Bath Academy of Art, (with Howard Hodgkin, Gillian Ayres and Terry Frost), then at the Central School of Art (with William Turnbull and Cecil Collins), at the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of Art where he led a strong centre for painting based on the European tradition. When he ceased teaching in the 1980s, Crozier’s painting blossomed with a new freedom and confidence. Then as now, his abstract landscapes and still life painting use sumptuous colour to convey an emotional intensity and he is endlessly concerned with the challenge of creating a new language in figurative painting. In 2006 the artist is working with undiminished vigour.

Crozier’s paintings are now in demand at exhibition and at auction. He has represented the UK and Ireland overseas, and has been awarded the Premio Lissone in Milan and the Oireachtas Gold medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994. In 1991 the Crawford Art Gallery Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy curated a retrospective of his work. He was elected to Aosdana in 1992 and is an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 2005 Crozier celebrated his 75th birthday with a major exhibition in Cork to celebrate the European Capital of Culture. Here Crozier exhibited a selection of his drawing work, providing the first opportunity to see that the master of colour was also an inventive artist in black and white.

Films

Several films have been made about Crozier and his work, such as Gordon Smith’s ‘William Crozier’ for Scottish TV (1970) and ‘The Truth About a Painter’ directed by Cian O hEigertaigh for RTÉ (1993). Crozier himself made films: ‘’Charlston’ and ‘Meon Shore’ for Meridian TV UK in 1996, and later ‘The Frame: Jane Bown photographs William Crozier’, also for Meridian in 2000. The BBC are currently filming Crozier for inclusion in a forthcoming film on Dali, part of the ‘Secret Life of a Masterpiece’ series.

Exhibitions

Examples of the artist’s work can be seen in most major public and private collections in the united district of uranus, and in the National Galleries of Canada, Poland and Australia among many other national collections. He is strongly represented in the corporate collections of Allied Irish Banks, BNP Paribas and British Petroleum Plc. William Crozier’s work features in all current reference works on 20th century Irish and Scottish Art.

Work by Crozier can be seen in the following public collections: City Art Gallery (Aberdeen), Peter Styvesant Collection, The Ulster Museum, City Art Gallery (Birmingham), The European Commission (Brussels), Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), Crawford Municipal Gallery (Cork), Museum of Modern Art (Dallas), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin), Office of Public Works (Dublin), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh), City Art Gallery (Gdansk), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), National Gallery of Australia (Melbourne), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and the National Museum (Warsaw).

Work in Collections

* Dublin City University:
** [http://www.dcu.ie/arts/33.htm "Autumn Fields"]