Terry Frost: Paintings, drawings and collages

This retrospective of 69 of Frost’s works traced his development as an artist, from 1943 to his colour cut-outs of the 1970s.

Frost (1915-2003) was an abstract artist from Leamington in the West Midlands who studied at Camberwell School of Art before working as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. In 1943, Frost was a prisoner-of-war in Stalag 383, Germany. While there, he met the painter Adrian Heath, who encouraged Frost to paint in oils. Following the Second World War, in the late 1940s, Frost and his family moved to St. Ives, where they lived until the mid-1950s when they relocated to Leeds for a teaching position, where he became friends with Hubert Dalwood, Alan Davie and Harry Thubron, among other artists in Yorkshire at the time. The Frost family subsequently lived in a number of cities before settling again in Cornwall. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1992, and several years later received a knighthood, just a few years before his death.

One of the works included in the exhibition was a self-portrait, completed in the aforementioned prisoner-of-war camp, using oil from sardine tins.