Alan Green, Annely Juda Fine Art

Alan Green was described in his obituary in the Guardian as a painter’s painter. The tender accolade was deemed appropriate because it nodded to his affection for the material processes that are the basis of painting. He was a man deeply in love with colour. How else can we explain a career spent endlessly re-arranging its potential?
Green was picked up by Annely Juda in 1970 and stayed with the gallery until his death in 2003. It means that this show is able to draw from a rich reservoir of work which so wonderfully pictures a particular moment in post war British painting, a moment that too often feels marginalized. There is modest purity to this type of abstraction, as practiced by Green, John Hoyland and Terry Frost, that retains a charm that American abstraction was never really able to achieve. Green’s paintings do not, perhaps, reach for the stars, but they are measured, considered and, in the truest sense of the word, composed.