HUMPHREY OCEAN: Sometimes I wonder

Sometimes I wonder

This exhibition invites you to step into the reflective world of Humphrey Ocean, a man very much of his generation – “post war and new hope”, as he says. His portraits possess a rare and compelling quality, drawing the viewer in. His early work, the 1984 portrait of Philip Larkin in the National Portrait Gallery for instance, described by Nick Hornby as ‘unanswerable’, shows a meticulous attention to detail. In the more recent portraits, the series A handbook of modern life, the work has evolved. Not only movement and tenderness, there is humour too – not in the expression of his solitary sitters, they occupy their own existential state of aloneness - but in the gaze of the artist himself, a shared and human understanding.

The exhibition includes a striking, large-scale landscape Traffic, in which a van is being followed on a motorway lined with trees, lampposts still glowing in the early light. It is a painting of uncanny simplicity, holding the viewer “hovering in the after-glow” to coin his  phrase.

The same refined approach is applied to everyday objects. His paintings of chairs transform an ordinary design wing chair into something deeply personal. They become a self-portrait, a reflection of presence and absence, memory and observation.

A surprising collection of small, very simple sculptures, evoking cars and ships, complete the exhibition.

Sometimes I wonder… is not only an exploration of portraiture but about seeing beyond the surface. Each figure, landscape and object carries a hidden narrative, waiting to be discovered.

About the artist

Humphrey Ocean is a painter. For a brief time 1971-3 he played bass with Kilburn and the High Roads and in 2004 he was elected a Royal Academician. In 1988 he went to Northern Brazil with the anthropologist Stephen Nugent. Their book Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks was published by Fourth Estate. In 2016 he wrote and presented The Essay for BBC Radio 3 about Impington College, the only Gropius building in Britain. In 2019 a new monograph, Humphrey Ocean by Ben Thomas and A Book of Birds by Humphrey Ocean were published by RA Publications. Most recently, in 2024, he showed That was close at DKUK in Peckham, London and Das Bild und sein Buch at Christine König Chapter III,  Vienna. His work is in public collections including British Council, British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Imperial War Museum, National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, Government Art Collection and The Whitworth, University of Manchester. He lives and works in London.