Curator's Notes:
This wonderful, richly-coloured rare example from Patrick Heron's January 1973 suite of silkscreen prints had been preserved under wraps in a museum collection since its creation.

Patrick Heron is widely regarded as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. Based in St Ives, Cornwall, his rich artistic legacy spanned the 1970s – the golden period from which this rare signed silkscreen print dates.

Throughout his career, Heron had worked in a variety of graphic media, from the silk scarves he designed for his father’s company Cresta from the age of 14, to a stained-glass window for Tate St Ives. His early works were strongly influenced by Matisse and Braque, and the graphic ‘cut-out’ nature of some of their compositions is clearly evident in these silkscreen prints of the 1970s.

In this phase of his work, Heron was fascinated with contrasting, and, complementary, colour associations which often manifested as ‘wobbly hard-edge’ jig-sawed components of vivid interlocking colour shapes.

An example from this edition is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London, and the Government Art Collection.