Untitled by Jim Latter 2002
Jim Latter is a painter, teacher and gallerist who has spent his working life looking hard at painting. He came to it first as a typographer, training and working in advertising and studying typography at Maidstone, before turning to painting at Hornsey College of Art and taking his MA at Chelsea. That early grounding in structure and proportion stayed with him, and much of his work is built on balance, geometry and the exact relation of colour, tone and surface.
His paintings have been shown at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool, at the Royal Academy, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Camden Arts Centre, and at the Serpentine Gallery in a Contemporary Art Society exhibition. His work was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society and is held in the collection of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.
Alongside his own painting he has taught, and he has looked. For more than fifteen years he was a visiting lecturer in painting at Chelsea, Saint Martins, Kingston, Brighton and Ravensbourne, teaching on the MA at Chelsea and coordinating its first year painters. He founded and directed the Round House Gallery in Chalk Farm, and later ran the exhibition programmes at the University of Essex Gallery and the Gardner Arts Centre in Sussex, selecting and showing many of the significant British artists of his generation.
That combination is what he brings to ESOP. A painter of fifty years’ standing, who has taught at the country’s leading art schools and chosen and hung the work of others, develops an eye that sees at once when a composition is unresolved, when the colour, the tone or the surface is not yet right. It is that eye, and the experience behind it, that he brings to the Wednesday studio.
Jim Latter (b. 1945, London) lives and works in London and France. Typography, Maidstone College of Art; BA Painting, Hornsey College of Art; MA Painting, Chelsea School of Art.
Selected Curriculum Vitae
Teaching
Visiting Lecturer in Painting at Chelsea School of Art, including its MA Painting course, and at Saint Martins School of Art, Kingston School of Art, Brighton College of Art and Ravensbourne College of Art.
Galleries and Exhibitions Directed
Founder and Director, Round House Gallery, Chalk Farm, London.
Exhibitions Director, Gardner Arts Centre, University of Sussex.
Exhibitions Organiser, University Gallery, University of Essex.
Among the artists he selected and exhibited were Phillip King, David Nash, Helen Chadwick, John Stezaker, Kim Lim and Paul Huxley.
Selected Exhibitions
John Moores, Liverpool.
30 London Painters, Royal Academy, London.
Platform ’72, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Contemporary Choice, Contemporary Art Society, Serpentine Gallery, London.
Three Painters, Camden Arts Centre, London.
Stations of the Cross, St Mary-le-Bow, London.
Solo exhibitions including Beardsmore Gallery, London.
Collections
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia. His work was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society.
Awards
Greater London Arts Award. Mural commission, Islington Council, London.
All images are Ⓒ Jim Latter. All rights reserved.