Art Collection

17 Duke of York Street

www.branch-arts.com | info@branch-arts.com
17 Duke of York
Street
 Contents
The Art Collection | Foreword 7

Artists:

Jeremy Annear 13

Dominic Beattie 16

Nigel Hall 19

Maggi Hambling 23

Alf Löhr 26

Barbara Macfarlane 28

Ruth Miemczyk 30

Makiko Nakamura 32

David Nash 34

Julian Opie 36

Victor Pasmore 39

William Peers 44

Joe Tilson 46

Anthony Turner 48

About Branch Arts 50

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!6Julian Opie | Stone Heads (series)
 David Nash | Blue Column

The Art Collection

The Atairos London Collection celebrates the opening
of the UK headquarters in 2018. Susie Lawson and
Flora Fairbairn, Branch Arts Co-Founders, were
delighted to be engaged by Atairos to build the art
collection for their new offices in St. James’s.

Branch Arts were thrilled by the synchronicity of  both

the names Atairos  and Branch Arts being inspired by
the Greek word for “partnership.’ The combined focus
on the importance of relationships was a huge
attraction, with a mutual aim for the collection to be
shared and enjoyed. The chosen artworks have a
timeless quality and reflect a good cross section of the
UK art world.

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With such a rich plethora of impressive
and highly regarded galleries being
located within the immediate vicinity of
the Atairos offices, Branch Arts
compiled a gallery tour of the area, to
include some of the most exciting
artists and galleries in the UK.
With the added benefit of Branch Arts’
longstanding connections within the art
world, they were able to take their
Atairos clients to visit the Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition before it
had opened and before anyone else
had seen it. So they were able to help
their client to have first-pick of the
!8
Victor Pasmore | Senzo Titolo 7
exhibited 1,352 artworks for sale on the
on the RA walls.
The artworks forming the collection
consist of some of the most well
respected UK-based artists. The group
includes works by artists at the forefront
of their field such as Julian Opie, best
known for his distinctive depictions of
figures, portraits and landscapes;
Maggi Hambling, known for her
expressive coast inspired paintings; Joe
Tilson RA, one of the leading figures
associated with the British Pop Art
Movement; Nigel Hall RA, one of the
most highly regarded sculptors in the
UK; David Nash RA, a sculptor and
land artist known for working with live
trees, and Victor Pasmore, a pioneer of
the abstract art movement in the 1940s
in the UK.
The diverse nature of the artworks in
the collection unifies artists who are
known for being masters of their
medium, and the aim of the
collection, aside from aesthetically
and creatively to enhance the
company’s offices, was to reflect the
rich diversity of the UK art scene and
to create a group of artworks that
would accumulatively increase in value over
time.

Branch Arts were delighted to work with Atairos

on the construction of their London art
collection which we hope will give enjoyment
for years to come. While art can cement status
within a sophisticated marketplace we feel it
has a more important role in inspiring
invaluable conversations.

Flora Fairbairn & Susie Lawson, 2018

Branch Arts co-founders
www.branch-arts.com

Nigel Hall | Drawing 1754

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Artists

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 Jeremy Annear is a British artist born in Exeter, England. His work is strongly

JEREMY influenced by the vibrant and modernist artists from Cornwall who were
working there in the 1950s and 60s, and by the craft-inspired primitivism of
artists such as Sir Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Roger

ANNEAR
Hilton, which shaped his own style and artistic explorations.

He started to make a name for himself in the mid 1980s, and since then he
has exhibited widely and regularly in solo and mixed shows in the UK and
abroad. With a formal education in painting and printmaking, Annear has
b. 1949 an acute understanding of how to balance conceptual themes with a
narrative. Annear works with oil on canvas and board, building images from
layered shapes and creating complex surface textures and favouring natural
earth tones juxtaposed against primary colours. 

The moment we look beyond the surface of Annear’s paintings we find that
their form is usually that of still lifes (the way they are organised, the formal
patterns explored in them) while their content (what they speak of) is nature:
the rhythms and shifting contrasts of landscape and seascape … and also
the other way around: still life in the form of landscape''. Metamorphosis is
the name of the game, and the prize awarded to the winner is the living,
often joyous harmony that radiates and resonates from the resulting picture.
Norbert Lynton

!13
 Solar II | Oil on Canvas | 150 x 120 cm

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Tripartite | Oil on Canvas | 150 x 120 cm

!15
 Dominic Beattie is a London born artist, who studied at Camberwell College

DOMINIC of Art. Beattie’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture and

furniture design. His works often reference the modernist movement of the
previous mid-century. Pattern and hard edge forms are skewed in his works,

BEATTIE
via experimental use of materials and techniques.

Untitled (2018) was inspired by geometric textile designs. The use of block
printing was a new technique, implemented to echo the repetition found in
folk quilt making. It forms part of a series of works exploring the connection
b. 1981 between domestic craft and high art.

The piece has previously been exhibited in Form, a group show at Cob
Gallery, London, in February 2018. It is the first work Beattie has entered
into the RA Summer Exhibition.

In 2018 the artist had two large-scale solo shows, at JGM Gallery and Fold
Gallery, both in London. His work is widely collected and most notably
appears in the Saatchi Gallery and Soho House collections.

Beattie is a prolific maker of things but believes in the need for an artwork
to be seen, recently quoted in a Christie’s Real Estate magazine feature as
saying:

Until an artwork is exhibited it doesn’t really exist.

!16
Untitled | Ink and Spray Paint on Plywood | 183 x 91 cm

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 Nigel Hall is known for abstract steel and aluminium sculptures, ranging

NIGEL from small to monumental in scale, He is cited as one of the most

celebrated sculptors in Britain. By layering solid and hollow geometric
forms within sinuous compositions, Hall engages the dynamic interplay of

HALL
negative and positive space.

His smaller-scale, more delicate aluminium objects and his graceful, free-
form drawings are inspired by the atmosphere of natural spaces, which
profoundly affect Hall. His works,  principally made of polished wood or
b. 1943 steel,  are concerned with three dimensional space, mass and line.  His
abstract and geometric sculptures give as much prominence to voids and
shadows as to the solidity of material and each work changes with light and
viewpoint reflecting the landscapes that inspired them.   

Hall studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, from 1960 to
1964 and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1964 to 1967. A
Harkness Fellowship took him to the United States from 1967 to 1969. He
has had many exhibitions around the world and has been widely collected.

He is well represented in numerous public collections in USA, Asia, Australia

and Europe including the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also undertaken
many private and public large-scale, site-specific commissions.

None of them attempts to describe the landscape, but they do share certain
characteristics: a stillness; a reference to verticality and its relationship to a
place and to the viewer; and a quiet, meditative quality which requires time.
Nigel Hall

!19
Drawing 1753 | Charcoal and Acrylic | 80 x 80 cm
Drawing 1754 | Charcoal and Acrylic | 80 x 80 cm
 Maggi Hambling  is a British painter and sculptor best known for her

MAGGI expressive portraits and sublime depictions of landscapes and seascapes.

Working in the tradition of  John Constable  and  J.M.W. Turner, Hambling’s

HAMBLING
close-up paintings of waves also call to mind the suspended, detailed prints
of Hokusai Katsushika. Aside from painting, the artist has made a number of
public sculptures, including A Conversation with Oscar Wilde in the centre
of London, and Scallop, dedicated to Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh beach,
Suffolk.
b. 1945
Hambling studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing
under Cedric Lockwood Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, before attending the
Slade School of Art. In 1980, Hambling became the first Artist in Residence
at the National Gallery in London, and soon after created a series of
portraits of the comedian Max Wall.

The artist’s works are in the collections of the British Museum, the Victoria
and Albert Museum, and Tate Gallery in London, and the Scottish Gallery of
Modern Art in Edinburgh, among others. Hambling lives and works in
London, United Kingdom.

I try to be a channel so that the truth of those waves, or the truth of the
person in front of me, if I’m doing a portrait, can come through me on to the
canvas, or through me into the sculpture or the monotype. The subject is in
charge and that’s very important.
Maggi Hambling
Rearing Wave | Oil on Canvas | 91 x 122 cm
Wall of Water | Monotype | 56 x 60 cm
 Born in Germany, Alf Löhr trained as an artist at the Academy of Modern Art

ALF in Düsseldorf with mentors like Ullrich, Reusch, Heerich, Richter and Beuys,
before moving to London where he received a Ph.D. at the Royal College of
Art. With the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation he moved

LÖHR
to America where he became visiting Professor at the School of Art, and a
fellow to the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of
Washington. On his return to Europe Löhr taught as a senior lecturer at the
Environmental Art Department at the Glasgow School of Art, and was
awarded the UWIC Fellowship in Cardiff where he founded Art and Ecology
b. 1957 Research Projects, an initiative to enable interdisciplinary projects for artists
with industry professionals.

 

From 2006 to 2008 Alf Löhr was made visiting Prof. of painting at the
Monash University in Melbourne which allowed him extensive travels
through the Australian desert. The confrontation with such wilderness
provoked a determination to focus solely on his life long passion for
painting. He returned to London and took a studio, first behind Tate Britain
and now in Bloomsbury where he paints large abstract works on paper and
canvas that capture time and fluidity.

A painting is lifeless if it is too controlled, too obviously patterned and

organised, and its objects too perfect. In truthful art as in a truthful
understanding of life there is always a hint or echo of chaos, incompatibility,
imperfection, and so every beautiful artwork also has an element of pathos.
Alf Löhr
Splash | Acrylic on Canvas | 170 x 210 cm
 Barbara Macfarlane is a British painter who captures the essence and the

BARBARA drama of wide-open spaces, for the contrasting elements of land and sky
and water, how they take the light, and how they meet and merge. She
searches these out across a wide variety of terrains: the coastline of West

MACFARLANE
Sussex to the sun-flooded hills of the South of France; the Greek islands;
the Outer Hebrides; and, more recently, in the historic maps and
panoramas of Early Modern townscapes.

After graduating from Exeter School of Art in 1981, she spent several years
b. 1958 working and travelling in India. During this time she co-founded Khadi
Papers, a company specialising in artist’s handmade paper. In 1994 they set
up their own paper mill in Karnataka, where they have developed new
papers such as Atlas and Great White, which Barbara uses in her work.

Her medium is pigment on paper, and these two elements share an almost
equal importance in her art. Working often on a large scale, she allows the
texture to play a leading part in each image. Contrasted against the
intensity of oil paint, the lambent brightness of water-colour, or the
calligraphy of charcoal lines, these artfully deployed expanses of naked
paper provide both a unity and a luminosity to work.

Barbara lives and works in West Sussex and has been involved for 10 years
as a volunteer in the community based Partners in Art scheme at
Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery. She has exhibited widely in Europe,
North America and Asia, and has had sell out solo exhibitions in London
and New York.

Through her work she has always striven to depict – and to reveal – the
essence of ‘land’. In large scale paintings on handmade paper -using
watercolour, oil paint, ink and mark making – she makes sense of the land’s
shape, its boundaries, its character, its history.
Matthew Sturgis
Midnight Manhattan II | Ink and Oil on Khadi Paper | 138 x 98 cm
 Ruth Miemczyk is an English-Polish artist born in Barnsley, Yorkshire. After

RUTH studying painting at Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College, she has
gone on to teach and exhibit across Europe. She currently lives and works in
Scarborough, Yorkshire.

MIEMCZYK In the early eighties, Miemczyk was involved with the Art in Hospitals
Scheme, through which her work toured throughout UK hospitals. She has
strong connections to Poland and has had several solo exhibitions including
the Poleski Osrodek Sztuki in Lodz and Dwor Karwacjanow in Gorlice. Her
b. 1949 works hang in several individual corporate and corporate collections.

Red Painting is from Miemczyk’s Polish series executed in 2015. Her abstract
works use strong blocks of hypnotic colour.

Painting is, for me, a visual language and is experienced as such through its
colour, shape, space, scale and through its visible processes. I don’t attempt
to depict the world or its events but rather to touch on a common resonance
Ruth Miemczyk
Red Painting | Oil on Canvas | 122 x 183 cm
 Makiko Nakamura is an abstract painter with an international reputation

MAKIKO whose finely worked abstract paintings are based on the meditative
repetition and erasure of grid like structures, and are distinguished by a
highly burnished, reflective surface.

NAKAMURA Nakamura was brought up by her grandparents and started to paint at a

very early age. Her grandfather and uncle were both artists and the house
was filled with their painting materials, which she was taught to use. During
childhood she learned the techniques of calligraphy and traditional
b. 1951 Japanese painting and, as an only child, described painting as becoming
her best friend and consuming her daily life.

In 1966 she went to art school in Kyoto to study printmaking, sculpture, film-
making and painting. Following the death of her parents in 1995, she
moved to Paris to continue her studies before going to America to study at
the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1999
she made the decision to move to Dublin where she lived and worked until
2013.

Nakamura begins with simple, repetitive geometric shapes or grids which

gradually disappear as she builds up each layer of paint. When complete,
she then reverses the process, slowly sanding away the paint surface to try
and find the starting grid, creating a new surface made up of scratches and
traces of colour from every layer of the work. Nakamura talks of this process
as being a way to see through time, revisiting memories hidden in the work,
and from their simple, minimalist beginning each painting takes on a more
organic and expressive character.
Canal City | Oil on Canvas | 91 x 91 cm
 David Nash, is a British sculptor and land artist working primarily with

DAVID natural materials and live trees. His wooden sculptures are made using
heavy equipment including chainsaws and blowtorches, morphing trees
into unexpected shapes such as his Oculus Block (2010), a melding of two

NASH
Eucalyptus stumps into a solid square.

He attended the Kingston College of Art and later the Chelsea School of
Art. Among his first and best-known works is  Ash Dome  (1977), for which
the artist planted a circle of ash trees to form a wooden dome, its location
b. 1945 kept secret to protect its delicate environment.

In his performance  Wooden Boulder (1978), Nash released a large carved

ball of wood on a Welsh mountainside to be taken by nature gradually
towards the Atlantic Ocean over the course of many years.

His work has been featured in the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Gallery
Lelong in Zürich, Sala de la Diputacion in Spain, Annely Juda Fine Art in
London, and Kew Gardens in Queens.

He was elected a Royal Academician in 1999, and was awarded an Order of

the British Empire for services to the arts in 2004.
Blue Column | Pigment on Paper | Edition of 20 | 106 x 71 cm
 Born in London, Julian Opie studied with  Michael-Craig Martin  at

JULIAN Goldsmiths in London during the early 1980s. He has since become one of
the leading contemporary British artist known for his distinctive depictions
of figures, portraits, and landscapes.

OPIE Opie has a distinctive, highly stylized style taking his influence from pop art
and remaining loyal to minimalism. His portraits typically represent features
by thick black outlines and filled in with solid areas of flat colour. Earlier
works consisted of painted steel sculptures exploring the relationship
b. 1958 between visual and spatial observation. Over time, the artist has expanded
his practice to include painting, installation, and cover art for albums.

The artist’s works are part of the collections of The Museum of Modern Art
in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam, and others.

This 2018 collection of four heads in limestone with a 5mm thick patinated
bronze insert is exemplary of Opie’s ability to cut through the visual clutter
to embark upon a new work.

There’s this tendency, because, I suppose, we’re dominated by the camera,

that we think of full-on HD resolution reality as being the starting-point,
whereas … I tend to think of the blank canvas or the blank sheet of paper as
the starting-point.
Julian Opie
 1 2 3 4

Stone Heads

1. Musician | 3. Secretary | Black Slate with inlaid Aluminium inserts | 64 x 52.4 cm

2. Shopkeeper | 4. Craftsman | Limestone Relief with inlaid Aluminium inserts | 64 x 52.4 cm

 Victor Pasmore was a significant British artist and architect who pioneered

VICTOR the development of abstract art in England during the 1940s and 50s. His
muted green and blue works were some of the most revolutionary paintings
in Britain at the time.

PASMORE He studied painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under  A.S.
Hartwick, painting views of the River Thames inspired by  J.M.W. Turner. A
conscientious objector in World War II, he was sentenced to serve 123 days
in prison.
b. 1908 - d. 1998
Around 1947, under the influence of the artist Ben Nicholson, he began to
produce his first abstract paintings. Unsatisfied with the Fauvist and Cubist
work that were popular in his time, Pasmore began teaching, first opening a
teaching studio with  Claude Rogers  and later serving as the Director of
Painting at the Camberwell School of Art in London. In a noted controversy,
Pasmore was appointed as a design consultant for the town of Peterlee,
where he had a Modernist structure built called the Apollo Pavilion (1955),
much to the disdain of its citizens.

Pasmore’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern

Art in New York, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, The Royal
Academy and the Tate Gallery in London.

I felt the picture has to be an independent object in its own right, not a
representation of another object
Victor Pasmore
Anxious Moment | Etching and Aquatint | 148 x 103 cm
Senzo Titolo 7 | Etching and Aquatint | 61 x 251 cm
Senzo Titolo 10 | Etching and Aquatint | 92 x 256 cm
Un Bel Di Vedremo | Etching and Aquatint | 50 x 233 cm
 William Peers is a sculptor based in Cornwall. Since leaving Falmouth Art

WILLIAM College, he has worked extensively in stone, exploring both figuration and
abstraction.

PEERS
Peers exhibits regularly at the John Martin Gallery, London and Everard
Read, London, as well as in group exhibitions across the UK including on
form at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, and solo shows in New York and San
Francisco. His work is included in a number of high profile private collections
b. 1965
and can range in size from wall hung reliefs to monumental garden
sculptures.

I like devising ‘rules of engagement’ when working; creating simple

instructions. I find the restriction liberating, which sounds counterintuitive,
but it actually can be transformative. Conversely, too many options can be
suffocating. ‘Mila’ is a simple ring. I have this idea that endless forms – of
which the ring is the simplest – can pull the attention of the viewer and
engage the eye as it circulates.

William Peers
Mila | Portuguese Marble | 54 x 76 x 15 cm
 Joe Tilson, born in London,  is an English artist who created painted relief

JOE sculptures from wood as well as prints and paintings. His unique visual
language draws on his early experience as a carpenter, and he later studied
at St. Martin’s School of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art in London,

TILSON
where he won the prestigious Rome Prize.

During the 1960s he became one of the leading figures associated with the
British Pop Art movement and, during the 1970s, Tilson’s work transitioned
from Pop Art themes and collages to mysterious, symbolic works based on
b. 1928 classical mythology, lunar cycles, and Neo-Platonic theory.

The artist’s career gained an international reputation once he had

represented the United Kingdom in the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964,
which famously included the works of  Robert Rauschenberg,  Jasper
Johns,  Claes Oldenburg, and  Jim Dine. His works are in the collections of
the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam,
and the Kunsthalle Basel, among others.
NY Decals 3 & 4 | Screenprint on Paper wth Glassine Envelopes | 91 x 102 cm
 Anthony Turner’s work is a contemplation of the nourishing abundance of

ANTHONY the natural world. Like domestic deities, Anthony’s  seeds, bean
pods,  berries  and abstract forms  offer a sense of communion with the
richness of life.

TURNER After studying psychology at Exeter University, and painting for ten years,
he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Peter Randall-Page for four years
to learn the traditional Italian methods of stone carving. He began making
his own work in 1994. With his main workshop in the   Teign   Valley on the
b. 1959 edge of Dartmoor in Devon, Anthony also works in a ramshackle milking
parlour in Oxfordshire. 

Anthony was born in Kenya in 1959 and lived on a coffee farm near Nairobi
and later on the north coast around Malindi. Early influences include two
meticulous Kikuyu craftsmen who taught him - Charles the carpentry
teacher at school and   Macharia  the farm carpenter - and the modest,
graceful elegance of the Giriama and Kamba people.  Since these early
days, Anthony has travelled whenever possible for immersion in the
extraordinary legacies left in stone by Celtic, Egyptian, Inca and Indian
craftsmen.
Tower Bean | Kilkenny Limestone | 137 x 122 x 15 cm
About Branch Arts
Founded by Flora Fairbairn and Susie Lawson

Branch Arts initiates and facilitates projects and collaborations in the arts.
As art consultants, we offer a bespoke approach to collectors’ needs. Branch Arts
act on behalf of their clients to secure works by some of the most exciting artists
working today as well as important artworks on the secondary market.

Flora Fairbairn is an independent curator and art advisor, with a

background in architecture. Since 2000, she has been producing exhibitions
in various non-gallery, architecturally interesting locations, working with
hundreds of artists from around the globe. Susie Lawson is a highly
experienced arts publicist who has worked with leading galleries, museums
and arts charities, providing strategic communications and initiating partnerships.

Having worked directly with over 500 artists over the last 20 years, we have
formed strong and long-standing relationships with artists and galleries enabling
us to source art at competitive prices.

The Branch Arts team have a long-standing record in producing and curating
collections, exhibitions, art commissions and site-specific installations worldwide.

www.branch-arts.com
info@branch-arts.com