On the occasion of what would have been the hundredth birthday of Albert Herbert (b. London, 1925 – d. Dorking, 2008), Isaac Benigson of Old and Interesting Art and Jane England of England and Co invite you to the opening of an exhibition of paintings and works on paper made by this idiosyncratic, visionary artist.

In the 1960s, Albert Herbert was working alongside many of the conceptual and abstract artists at the epicentre of the British avant-garde.  Herbert, always a figurative painter at heart, made a volte-face and abandoned his contemporaneous explorations of abstraction and found his own way by creating seemingly child-like etchings and small paintings, predominantly using imagery and stories from the Bible.

His paintings of Old Testament scenes were not exclusively symbolic of religious sentiment; rather, his dream-like images were, in essence, delineations of his inner world. His use of biblical and theological symbols and images acts as metaphors, with a metaphysical poetic vision that places him in the tradition of William Blake. Herbert’s powerful spiritual imagination serves as a lens in which to access the unknown.

Albert Herbert always saw himself as something of an “outsider” in the London art world, although he mixed with major interlocutors of the contemporary art scene in the 1960s. He became a tutor at St Martin’s School of Art in 1964, and was later Principal Lecturer for 21 years. He recalled that ‘at that time, to be figurative was in itself a bad thing. My colleagues at St Martin’s thought that 20th-century art was essentially abstract. If you hadn’t understood that, you had failed to grasp a basic truth. Consequently, I decided that what I had been doing was retrogressive, obsolete nonsense and threw myself into the avant-garde.’ St Martin’s was a centre of modernism – Herbert gave Yoko Ono some teaching, and his fellow lecturers included Gillian Ayres, Leon Kossoff and John Latham.

The seemingly naïve, yet highly sophisticated small paintings he produced from the early 1980s reveal how he constantly transformed himself as he explored ‘what lies beneath the surface of the mind’. Herbert’s artworks from the later-part of his career are independent from the art-world mainstream, rather they are works of a great dreamer, an assertion of inward imagination—constructing the world anew.

It is with enormous pleasure that Old and Interesting Art hosts a solo exhibition of Albert Herbert’s work for the first time since 2008, in collaboration with England and Co who have championed the artist for over three decades. Old and Interesting Art’s programme focuses on artists with a radical vision, whose artistic practices challenge conventional boundaries and offer divergent artistic interpretations.