Victor Willing: Paintings for the Serpentine

An exhibition of works by Victor Willing, including seven paintings made especially for the show.

This exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery’s north room presented seven paintings Willing made especially for the show. Willing (1928-88) painted five of the seven works in Cambridge. “The original idea was that the paintings would push back the walls of the gallery and create space, but they have turned out rather claustrophobic and the object comes very much forward into the space you occupy,” commented Willing.

John McEwen wrote: “The most immediate observation that can be made of these pictures is that their nature is visionary, their subject space. An eerie, sometimes a terrible sense of emptiness, of loneliness, is their mood.”