Alan Gouk, who has died from most cancers aged 84, was an formidable summary painter and an eloquent and passionate author, dedicated to the persevering with energy of modernism. For a few years he taught sculpture at St Martin’s College of Artwork (now Central Saint Martins, a part of the College of the Arts London). He was primarily influenced by American summary expressionism, though turned aware of the European foundation of his artwork – his private lodestars had been the painters Henri Matisse, Hans Hofmann and Patrick Heron.
A job as exhibition officer to the British Council within the early Nineteen Sixties offered Alan with an important introduction to the London artwork world. In 1967 he was really helpful by the sculptors Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Isaac Witkin to be chair of the sculpture boards at St Martin’s, the place college students {and professional} artists would current and fiercely debate their work.
In 1970 he turned head of the superior sculpture course at St Martin’s and in 1981 senior lecturer in sculpture. Working with the pinnacle of sculpture, Tim Scott, Alan was concerned in a controversial and short-lived rethinking of sculptural schooling centred on an intense research of the physique. He retired from St Martin’s in 1990.
Throughout the second half of the 70s, Alan took half within the artist-run studio exhibitions at Stockwell Depot in south London, bastions of modernist abstraction because it turned more and more marginalised. His inclusion in an exhibition of 4 London-based Scottish painters on the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1977 led him to quarrel with the American critic Clement Greenberg, considered one of plenty of Alan’s public disagreements with dominant art-world figures.
Alan held his first London solo exhibition in 1987, exhibiting subsequently with Flowers Gallery, Poussin Gallery and most not too long ago Felix & Spear. I met Alan at Poussin and our conversations had been an necessary a part of my introduction to trendy portray and central to my analysis on Stockwell Depot. I wrote three quick essays on his work, most not too long ago for Hampstead College of Artwork in 2022.
Born in Belfast, Alan was the son of Grace (nee McElhinney), a nurse, and Ronald Gouk, a business traveller. In 1944, when he was a younger little one, the household moved to Glasgow, the place he attended Hutchesons’ grammar college. His research in structure, in Glasgow and London, and psychology and philosophy, in Edinburgh, weren’t accomplished. Following his father’s early dying, in 1963 Alan dedicated himself to portray.
He was twice a winner of the John Moores Portray prize, in 1967 and 2002. In 1987 the Tate acquired his Cretan Premonition. Different work are held by the Arts Council of Nice Britain, the British Council and the Calouste Gulbenkian Basis.
His first marriage, to Margaret Emburey, resulted in divorce in 1967. He met Patricia Man in 1968 and so they married in 1984, residing in Stroud, London and Ramsgate. Alan maintained his major studio in Montrose, on the coast between Dundee and Aberdeen, typically residing there alone for half the yr in a flat that was as soon as a part of a home owned by his great-grandfather.
He’s survived by Patricia, three youngsters – Paul from his first marriage, and Alexis and Sholto from his second – and 6 grandchildren.
