"The Big City - London painted on a grand scale"

A new exhibition about London - The Big City: London painted on a grand scale - has opened at the Guildhall Art Gallery. 

It focuses on the world’s most extensive collection of supersize paintings of London

Venue: Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard, England, EC2V 5AE

Dates: until Sunday 23 April 2023

Hours: Mon to Sun: 10:30am-4pm (last admission 3.45pm)

Admission: Pay What You Can i.e. you can pay as much or as little as you like for your ticket or visit for free.

It's a unique exhibition which 

• celebrates the exceptional talent of 19 artists and 
• showcases some of the largest paintings in the the City of London Corporation's, including works that are not normally on public display.

The Big City: London painted on a grand scale includes:

• a series of pieces by David Hepher (b.1935), on display in London for the first time. The works were gifted to the City Corporation by the artist in 2022 and is the largest donation in the Gallery’s recent history. His career spans six decades and for the last 40 years he has focused almost exclusively on London, in particular, the inner-city estates of the 1960s and 1970s.

Graffiti tags, based on Hepher’s own observations, adorn the paintings in various colours, while the canvases themselves are primed with a mixture of concrete, PVA, and wood to create the illusion of tower-block walls, onto which Hepher has applied paint to mimic the small streams of slime that often stain concrete structures.

• a four-piece panel installation by John Bartlett (b.1960) - one of the largest items in the show
• gigantic works of art from Frank O. Salisbury (1874-1962) and Terence Cuneo (1907-1996) that have never been displayed side-by-side.

I've not seen it yet - but it's one I'm planning to visit in the near future. I must confess I'm more interested in historical views of London and having done a search of Art UK, I'm interested to see which artworks they've selected for the exhibition. 

Some I'd love to see are

• Parliament and Lambeth Palace, London by Alfred Daniels (1924–2015)
• Billingsgate Market, London by Ken Howard (1932–2022)

but I'm not sure they're big enough....

I will be reporting back after I've seen the exhibition