Norman Stevens ARA: Selected Prints

An exhibition featuring the much admired prints of Norman Stevens ARA (1937–88), an artist who originally trained as a painter alongside John Loker, David Hockney RA and David Oxtoby in the 1950s at Bradford College of Art.

A master of the medium, Stevens taught himself printmaking in the early 1970s and in the process, found an art form that perfectly suited his meticulous and subtle approach. Exploring the landscape and built environment, his prints make use of colour, light and shade to powerful and often haunting effect. Human presence is always suggested but never shown, a quality that the art critic, William Packer, has likened to a ‘game of hide-and-seek with the real world’.

At the heart of the exhibition are important groups of prints including Stevens’ depictions of Venetian blinds and ‘clapboard’ houses, his distinctive images of Stonehenge and his captivating views of English formal gardens. From his first black and white etchings to the large-scale prints he produced in the 1980s, discover the work of an artist who developed an international reputation for his technically brilliant and beguiling prints.