forthcoming past Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios: 133 OXFORD GARDENS, LONDON W10 6NE Email: info@tristanhoare.com All Contents © Copyright 1998-2012 Tristan Hoare Complex, 1997 Silver Gelatin Print Edition of 15 Ceylon Bells, 1996 Charcoal Fresson Print Edition of 15 The Rose and the Artichoke, 1980 Silver Gelatin Print Edition of 25 John Stewart 25th November- Extended to 18th February Born in London, lives and works in Paris John Stewart came to photography by chance. He had just returned to the West after three and a half years as a Japanese prisoner of war when he met Henri Cartier-Bresson at the opening of the Matisse Chapel in St-Paul-de- Vence. Stewart had a small Leica with which he had taken photographs he'd never seen. Cartier- Bresson sent him to his processing lab in Paris to learn how to print, crop and enlarge. Soon after and back in New York Stewart began working for Alexei Brodovitch, the celebrated Russian art director of Harper's Bazaar. Each week, in Richard Avedon's studio, Brodovitch, a notoriously tough taskmaster, would teach photography to some twenty pupils, Stewart amongst them. "Irving Penn", Brodovitch told him, "has been trained for still life, Richard Avedon for fashion. You are to engage in beauty, fashion, still life, reportage, portraits. Everything." In the mid-1970s after years working in advertising and fashion, Stewart abandoned commercial photography to devote himself to his personal work, rediscovering his early fascination with still life. He developed an intuitive style based on close observation and sensitivity, focusing his attention on textiles, flowers and man-made objects that are often discarded and rusty with time. Stewart aims to 'make' photographs rather than take them and the result brings his work very close to painting. It certainly owes much to the Masters - we see Zurbarán in the draperies, Chardin and Morandi in the objects. Yet the classic still life undergoes a subtle change enhanced by his use of the Fresson Process, a charcoal photographic printing process invented in the 19th century. Every print requires hours of such painstainking work that the Fresson studio only produces two thousand a year. The result is a uniquely textured photograph with the density of paint. This exhibition encompasses the many aspects of Stewart's forty-year interest in still life. His folds and draperies series developed from a fascination with artists' attempts to portray folded fabric. Once a year for two decades Stewart would strive to produce a new version of the cloth in Zurbarán's Veil of Veronica and this obsession led him to look at fabrics of all kinds. His flowers draw inspiration from the East and his latest series, in color, was taken during a visit to a 17th-century rural Ming village in China. Stewart's photographs are constantly evolving and this retrospective, the first in the UK, is a rare opportunity to have a closer look at the work of an extraordinary photographer.