'Journeys in Art' is the first retrospective of Alexander Hollweg's art and will feature paintings and sculpture from across the six decades of his career. He painted for many years from the Nettlecombe estate, home to a creative community of artists, musicians and writers, nestled in rural West Somerset.
The exhibition will display watercolours of pastoral and industrial scenes inspired by Hollweg's life in Somerset and London. Local depictions include the hamlet of Yarde, Willett Tower and Watchet, a place Hollweg loved. Portraits and still life paintings also feature, together with woodcuts. Visitors will be able to see some of the 40 painted wooden sculptures that were exhibited at Hollweg's first major exhibition, held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1971. It was this show which led to his work being exhibited internationally, including in Italy and New York. His best-known work, the woodcut 'Country Dance', was commissioned to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of John Constable in 1976 and is now part of the Tate Collection. One of Hollweg's largest and most ambitious commissions, is a mural for the Charlotte Street Hotel in London, which was completed in 2000.
Hollweg was raised in a creative and intellectual family. His grandfather was the leading British modernist painter Edward Wadsworth, his mother the writer Barbara Wadsworth and his father the German Olympic Ice Hockey player Joachim von Bethmann-Hollweg. Having studied languages at New College, Oxford, he arrived at Camberwell School of Art in 1960, and there began his long association with arts schools, first as a student and later as a teacher.
He married Geraldine James, a fellow Oxford student, in 1962. At first they lived in London while Hollweg was teaching at Maidstone College and also working as an artist. But soon their friendship with John and Pat Wolseley of Nettlecombe drew them to the West Somerset where they became key figures in the artistic community that was developing there. By 1973 the family included their son Lucas and daughter Rececca, and Nettlecombe became their permanent home.
'Journeys in Art’ has been produced in partnership with The Court Gallery.
https://swheritage.org.uk/events/alexander-hollweg/