In love with paint

Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show that has been six years in the making, as the gallery’s director, Robert Travers, gradually acquired good examples of the artist’s oeuvre. The most recent find was a superb still-life, ‘Fish with Grill’ from 1954–5, which brought to the show the required gravitas to enable it to go ahead, and was inevitably among the first things to be sold. There are no late paintings here. Coker was incapacitated by two heart attacks and a stroke in 1990, and was unable to work for a decade. Remarkably, he began to paint again in 2002, but that final flowering is very much to be seen as a separate period of his career, and it has been extensively exhibited as such.