Terry Setch: A Retrospective by Michael Tooby and Martin Holman

Setch has long been acknowledged as an exemplary figure in post-war British artistic practice by any painter's sternest critics - his fellow artists. That reputation has been sustained through a professional career of more than forty years by his dual commitment to creativity and to teaching.

Writing in a free and discursive spirit, Michael Tooby places Setch within the context of his contemporaries, such as John Hoyland, Michael Sandle and Gillian Ayres, and against the background of a changing art world. Setch is one of a generation of leading British artists whose work was fundamentally affected by American abstract expressionism in the late 1950s. Since his earliest encounter with the paintings and heroic image of Jackson Pollock, Setch has ceaselessly explored new avenues of practice to deepen his sense of 'being in the painting' in an almost physical way. As with Pollock himself, Setch has long perceived painting as an arena in which an artist performs to transform the materials he works with.

His work has frequently also encompassed a commentary on the world about him. Among the most memorable are the huge paintings on ship's canvas that from the early 1970s have incorporated detritus from the beach near his home in Penarth, south Wales, a place that has inspired him for over thirty years. They are intelligent objects and constantly in dialogue with the present and the art of the past. In a detailed and extensively documented chronological survey, Martin Holman explores the guiding themes that lie behind fifty years of Setch's work, and the often unconventional techniques that Setch has employed to express them. Always alert to the possibilities of new media, Setch has recently extended his source of imagery to the internet.

'He is an original,' was the verdict of the critic John McEwen on Setch in 1992. 'He updates Turner; politicises Jackson Pollock; ruralises Rauschenberg.' The full extent of Setch's unique expression can be traced in this book.

Michael Tooby is the Director of the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff and Martin Holman is a freelance writer and arts consultant.

96 pages, 60 illustrations 43 in colour
sofback 240 x 280 mm
published March 2001
19.95 GBP