First exhibition by a living artist to open at Stanley Spencer Gallery next month

A new exhibition and first collaboration with a contemporary artist will arrive at Cookham’s Stanley Spencer Gallery this winter.

‘Everywhere is heaven’ will feature the works of Stanley Spencer and Roger Wagner, both described as 'visionary geniuses' and influenced by 17th century metaphysical poets.

Several works from Wagner's private collection evoking the ‘mystical in everyday experience’ will be on display at the Cookham High Street gallery from November.

Curator Amanda Bradley Petitgas said: “The Stanley Spencer Gallery is delighted to collaborate with Roger Wagner in its first collaboration with a living artist.

“His work chimes perfectly with Spencer’s, both in its form, expression and spirit. Both artists, in their own way, express in painterly terms the beauty and spirituality of the world we live in.”

Born in 1957, Wagner studied at the Royal Academy School of Art and is also a published poet.

His work is inspired by Stanley Spencer’s paintings, and just as Spencer found Cookham to be ‘heaven on earth’, Roger also depicted biblical happenings in contemporary settings.

Both artists were informed by Italian Renaissance Primitives, such as Fra Angelico, but while Roger visited the monastery of San Marco as a boy, Spencer relied on the black and white images in his Gowans and Gray art books.

Roger met Giorgio de Chirico in Venice in 1973 – an artist who described his own style as ‘metaphysical’, and whose influence is portrayed in Roger’s 'noiseless and enigmatic' landscapes.

Spencer and Wagner are united by a ‘love of metaphysicals’ and were influenced by Thomas Traherne and John Donne.

The title of the exhibition references Spencer’s own words about his painting, 'John Donne arriving in Heaven' and his description of the four figures facing in all directions because ‘everywhere is heaven so to speak’.

The painting, on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, will feature in the exhibition.

瓦格纳说:“我第一次见到约翰·多恩抵达Heaven when I was a student at the RA and have been aware ever since of travelling on a parallel path.

“Spencer might have seemed out of step with his contemporaries, but his desire to paint what George Herbert called ‘heaven in ordinary’ – the transcendent in the everyday – places him in a deep tradition of English painting and poetry, so that exhibiting alongside his work feels like joining with a great cloud of witnesses.”

Works including ‘Builders of the Tower of Babel’ and ‘Making Columns for the Tower of Babel’ will be exhibited from November 9 to March 24, 2024.