David Tress - A Retrospective

Foreword

David Tress’s first solo show with Messum’s opening at the end of May comprise a partial retrospective selection of paintings and drawings by this renowned and complex artist...

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David Tress’s first solo show with Messum’s opening at the end of May comprise a partial retrospective selection of paintings and drawings by this renowned and complex artist. Spanning the past twelve years and including many recent works, the exhibition highlights the tremendous vitality and romance of Tress’s artistry.

Tress has lived in Pembrokeshire for over forty years and the ruggedly elemental landscape of South Wales remains the catalyst for much of his work. He is fascinated not only with nature, but also with the more sensual effects the changing seasons and natural phenomena exercises upon the landscape. Moreover, he is a British Romantic in the truest sense in that he understands how landscape can be an eloquent vehicle for human emotion and passion. This ethos translates in his resonant grasp of colour and bold handling of media whereby the landscape remerges onto his canvas and paper in great swathes of pigment and layers of collage. The scored and rent surfaces of his work catching the light like a glacier-dug valley.

Tress was born in London in 1955 and grew up there, showing an early interest in painting, drawing and natural history. After studying biology, he changed course and spent a year at Harrow College of Art, before taking a Fine Art degree course at Trent Polytechnic. While he was at Trent, he became involved with experiments in conceptual and performance art but later, came to question the assumptions of modernism. His rejection of modernism was, however, not so much a return to the beginning, as a rite of passage, which has brought to his landscape and figurative painting some aspects of abstraction retained from his earlier work. Tress has exhibited in Wales, England, Ireland, France, Holland and America and has works in public collections including: The National Museum of Wales, The Contemporary Art Society for Wales, The National Library of Wales, MOMA Wales, The Guildhall Art Gallery City of London, and Pallant House Gallery Chichester.