Now this is exciting from the off, from the first step around the corner into the main room of the beautifully big gallery and a first glimpse of what always promised to be a good exhibition. Oh I have missed this space, it is only open by appointment now, you can no longer just walk in, it has been that way for maybe a couple of years now and we have just walked in to so many fine exhibitions in this valued East London space; that brilliant show from Ken Currie a couple of years back, Tai Shan Schierenberg’s Headspace, Kevin Sinnott’s big big paintings, Nicola Hicks and her transforming of the space with her Dump Circus, so many rewarding shows, it was so good to just be able to walk in to one of the few big art spaces in East London now. And yes I know, can’t complain, it is expensive running any gallery let along a big space like this, and the shows are always free and, as we have said before, none of this should ever be taken for for granted, Flowers Gallery is a commercial space after all, they are running a business. But I have missed just walking in here and well, the gallery, for what is now a very rare occasion, was, if you were lucky enough to have the social media algorithm allow the announcement to flow your way, open to all last Saturday. Shame it was such a disgusting day in terms of the weather, shame I was the only one in the space for most of the half an hour or so that I was in the gallery (yes I could make an appointment but, let’s be honest, that is a rather intimidating commitment and you do feel a little guilty about taking up people’s time when there’s way less that the tiniest of chances of them making a sale, not that I would love to have a David Hepner painting to look at every day or even a wall big enough to hang one on, would they fit on a wall in one of those South London flats?). Here’s a #43SecondFilm…   

“Celebrating David Hepher’s 90th birthday, this presentation surveys the artist’s renowned focus on London’s iconic tower blocks, as he views himself as fundamentally a landscape painter, stating, ‘I just paint what is around me.’ For over six decades British artist David Hepher (b. 1935) has centred his work on the urban landscapes of south London. Exploring the scale and ‘austere grandeur’ of the expansive modern social housing estates built in the 1960s and 70s, Hepher was attracted to the formal beauty of their grid-like structures and by the physical and emotional traces of their many inhabitants. His multivalent work has both celebrated and mourned modernism in modes that are futuristic and nostalgic, utopian and entropic”. Are they iconic? That is such an over used term, at least they weren’t called vibrant, those buildings are not vibrant, they’re not really iconic are they, they’re not Trellick Tower, they are very very real, almost but never quite Banal, they are very Millwall, no one likes them, they don’t care…

And it does, despite the state of decay and the attention paid by Millwall’s finest, feel like a celebration. This big big paintings feel like a positive comment on concrete, on the optimism of those 60s high-rise dwellings and the hope of that white heat of technology. Sure, by the 1970s, the enthusiasm for the buildings had deteriorated, they didn’t  weather well, the degradation, vandalism, the depilation of community, all of which are very obviously “essential to narratives explored by Hepher”.  

“On both small and monumental scales and often across multiple panels, Hepher replicates a builder’s application of textured and deteriorated facades, pushing the paintings to the brink of abstraction. Pours of paint, drips. staining and graffiti disrupt the ordered geometry of the structures and reflect increasing physical and social changes of the buildings themselves”.

It is the big ones that take the initial attention, monumental paintings that pull you in rather that just invite you, big paintings that invite you in for a cup of tea or at least to examine the door numbers, the details. Is there a lack of people, even in the lightbulb light of the night views? You don’t at first notice the pieces actually painted on pieces of concrete  over there, when you do they are rather brilliant. It does feel exciting in here, a lifetime of work, a reality, indeed the real stuff – all that Keeping scores of people stacked up so high, All stacked up in a high rise block – and those drips for tree branches and those graffiti marks for bits of blossom and Spurs South of river taking liberties. And those layers, the vandalism, his vandalism over the meticulousness,  the time taken and the seconds to destroy or to humanise or to soften or to make it your own or to mark you territory (no one liked going to Millwall back there)

This of course is a brilliant exhibition, it does feel like a celebration, a celebration of humanity, of concrete, or real life and of course a celebration an an artist who doesn’t feel like he’s finished yet, this does feel like his best work yet. Those flats, hemmed in, those high-rise lives above the ground where all they can hear is the sound of the wind in the antennae. It’s a human zoo, a landscape, of course I love this show, layers of life, the marks of life, layers to peel back, to look through, brutal, beautiful… (sw) 

The East London branch of Flowers Gallery is at 82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP. The show goes on until 28th February 2025. Viewing the exhibition alas is by appointment only. Find the space at the Shoreditch Church end of Kingsland Road, just over from Great Art. Flowers have been brilliant in recent years, and all for free, very very easy to take all this for granted.

Please click on an image to enlarge and see it all, these poor quality images are there to give you a hint of a flavour. Do go if you have a chance.