Pallant House exhibition pays tribute to British landscape painter Adrian Berg

Exhibition: Adrian Berg: A Memorial Exhibition, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 30 September 2012

Pallant House Gallery is paying tribute to landscape painter Adrian Berg in the first exhibition of his paintings since he died in November 2011.

Berg was best known for his depictions of parks and gardens such as Windsor, Kew, Dartington, Nymans, Stourhead and Sheffield Park which he painted in distinctively vibrant colours.

He continuously found new ways of recording the landscape and returned repeatedly to a single subject over weeks, months and even years – often examining the effects of the season on the same scenes.

Working in oil and watercolour, he experimented with different dilutions of paint to achieve a richness of colour, as well as studying ways in which water altered the forms of the subjects he painted.

Berg was reportedly inspired to paint parks and gardens by the view of Regent's Park from his window at Gloucester Gate where he lived for almost a quarter of a century.

Over the subsequent decades he went on to paint many of our greatest gardens, such as the glass houses and trees at Kew and the reflections in the lakes at Sheffield Park in Sussex and Stourhead in Wiltshire.

He was also a tutor at Camberwell, the Central School and later the Royal College of Art, where notable pupils included Tracey Emin who affectionately called him ‘Bergy Baby'.

“Adrian Berg was the leading British painter of our public parks and gardens,” says Pallant curator Simon Martin.

“His use of colour was distinctive and vibrant, but his paintings went beyond being just sensuous renditions of verdant foliage and flowers - they were carefully considered paintings about looking itself.”

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