About the Artist

Abstract painter and sculptor John Edwards was central to the British art scene in the 1960s and 70s. Edwards is one of Britain's leading abstract artists though he also enjoyed acclaim in the United States. He was a talented teacher and served as head of painting and sculpture at St Martin's School of Art, London, in the 1980s. After retiring from teaching, he maintained a prodigious output of paintings and sculptures over the next 20 years, and showed work regularly in exhibitions in London and abroad.

His forms were influenced by the jazzy, improvisational techniques of the abstract expressionist painters who came into favor in New York after WWII. But his paintings had an architecture that resembled sculptural forms and, conversely, his sculptures had a painterly touch, often light and airy. The curator and critic Jill Lloyd observed: "The power and vitality of the work has much to do with an interplay of opposing forces. Edwards's art is reductive; abstract language of forms is counterbalanced by the artist's emotive and lyrical sense of color."