Hirschl & Adler Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition The Paintings of Richard Lonsdale-Hands (1913-1969), a retrospective marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s first show at Hirschl & Adler Modern.  Best known as a gifted, successful designer and pioneer “ad man”, he founded Richard Lonsdale-Hands Associates in 1937 and spent the war years designing camouflage for the British army. Within a decade he was a leader in British design and an internationally recognized captain of industry.

Lonsdale-Hands began to paint in 1947 as a means of recreation and self-expression. By his own admission, design had an inherent limitation to creativity, as it primarily required that aesthetics be subordinated to practical and commercial concerns. Lonsdale-Hands turned to painting as a means of exercising his creative engine. Though initially art was for him a second vocation, Lonsdale-Hands grew increasingly serious about his painting, eventually pursuing a public career as an artist. He would go on to produce over 500 works before his untimely death in 1969.

The artist’s vital and enigmatic paintings are intensely personal expressions of his private life. Unlike most leisure painters who might seek solace in a still life or tranquil landscape, Lonsdale-Hands painted a hurricane. He chose bold, gutsy subjects. Some of his figures are highly sexualized; others explore the physical and mental illnesses of those closest to him. They can be unsettling, or whimsical. But always they are deeply introspective compositions, energetically executed and free of pretense. While it’s clear the artist was aware of the modern masters of his day, there is also striking originality in the simplicity of his form, the agitation in his line, the complexity of his surface.

Lonsdale-Hands painted in England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. From 1960 to 1962, his paintings were exhibited in a series of one-man shows in London, Rome, Paris, and New York, including a show of sixty paintings held at Hirschl & Adler Galleries in May–June 1961, his only exhibition in the United States. In each city, Lonsdale-Hands’s work was celebrated for its almost primitive spontaneity and sophisticated color and design. His work might have received a wider audience but for the fact that many works sold into private collections in the United States and Europe, and for his early death, after which his paintings were stored at his family’s home in France. Now after fifty years his impressive body of post-war expressionist artworks is finally being offered to the public once again.

The Paintings of Richard Lonsdale-Hands (1913-1969) opens on Thursday, September 8 and runs through Saturday, October 8, 2011. Located in the landmark Crown Building at the world-famous corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, Hirschl & Adler Modern is open Tuesday through Friday, from 9:30 am to 5:15 pm, and, beginning September 17th, Saturdays from 9:30 am to 4:45 pm.

For additional information or images, please contact Shelley Farmer, Director, Tom Parker, or Dunham Townend, at 212-535-8810 (phone) / 212-772-7237 (fax), or by email at ShelleyF@HirschlAndAdler.com, TomP@HirschlAndAdler.com, or DunhamT@HirschlAndAdler.com. Please visit our website at www.HirschlAndAdler.com for an online preview of the exhibition.