Bomberg/Marr: Spirits in the Mass

Published to accompany the exhibition at Piano Nobile that concentrates on the years after the Second World War when Bomberg became an influential teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, the fully illustrated catalogue Bomberg / Marr: Spirits in the Mass will be the first examination of the personal and creative bonds uniting these two pioneers of modern British painting. Both artists endeavoured to strip the external world to its bare essentials. Often using powerful organic tonalities, Bomberg and Marr worked toward a vigorous expression of their subjects through an architectural and analytic, yet fraught and unstable formal construction. Alongside other much-admired students at the Borough Polytechnic such as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, Marr sought out what Bomberg described as 'the spirit in the mass': a sense of immanence, of intangible significance held in the painter's communion with the shifting solidity of the physical world. Presenting a discerning selection of major works, Bomberg / Marr: Spirits in the Mass will place Marr, for the first time, in his rightful place as not just a pupil of Bomberg's but a peer. Through these rarely exhibited landscapes, self-portraits, and still lifes from private collections and Marr's personal collection, this cayalogue aims to achieve a fuller appreciation of both artists.