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Terry Frost

Leamington Spa, England, 1915 - 2003

BiographySir Terry Frost was born in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire in 1915. He began to paint during World War II, after being taken prisoner during the invasion of Crete in 1941. He decided that he wanted to become a painter at the end of the war, and attended Camberwell School of Art thanks to an ex-serviceman's grant. He also attended the St. Ives School of Art and in 1951 worked as an assistant to sculptor Barbara Hepworth. His first one-man show was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1952. He exhibited in London many times, with a major retrospective, Terry Frost: Six Decades, being held at the Royal Academy in 2000. One of Britain’s most distinguished abstract artists, Terry Frost received his knighthood in 1998. “Frost favored shapes based on the circle or half-circle, such as wedges and crescents, while he increasingly used saturated color in intertwining loops and arcs, half-circles and bands. Rather than giving predominance to either color, form or facture, and thereby establishing a single-minded thrust of development, he made these formal elements interact in a composite and loosely evocative abstraction” (Adrian Lewis, Grove Dictionary of Art.) Patricia Singh, a friend and colleague who represented Sir Terry at London's Beaux Arts Gallery for 25 years, described him as one of the forerunners of abstract painting in the UK. "He was a tremendously influential force in British art and will go on being so," she said. "He had a very, very joyful personality and that was the great strength of his work. They were life affirming paintings that were full of colour and air.” (Quoted from BBC News Obituary, 2 September 2003.)

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