David Remfry is the celebrated British painter best known for his large-scale watercolour paintings, in particular the works he made in the 1980s and 1990s, captured liberated friends and the colourful characters he met during 17 years spent living and working at the storied Hotel Chelsea, New York City.
This major retrospective at East Riding Museum indeed marks a homecoming for 82-year-old Remfry – whose career began in Yorkshire, where he studied at Hull College of Arts and Crafts, before moving to London after he graduated in 1964. The show charts a dazzling career and life through five decades of painting and drawing in Yorkshire, London and New York, acknowledging Remfry’s contributions to the development of British art (he received an MBE for Services to British Art in America in 2001).
From Remfry’s first solo show in 1973 to his solo show to his portraits of people and their beloved dogs, to more recent paintings returning to oil, his work remains consistently full of life, of love – and of course, dancing, a subject he has also devoted many works to, a form of joyful rebellion and freedom.
