Euan Uglow - Biography

Biography

Euan Uglow was born 10 March 1932 in London and as a child lived in Tulse Hill in south London. His father was an accountant, and Uglow went to the local grammar school in Tulse Hill, Strand School. Afterwards he studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1948 to 1950. This was a time when Camberwell students studied under some of its most distinguished artists of the time, including Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Gowing, John Minton, Kenneth Martin and William Coldstream. It is debatable whether Uglow fell most under the influence of Coldstream whilst at Camberwell, and this is certainly the dominant view, although Uglow himself believed it was another tutor there, the painter Claude Rogers, was more significant in his development. Nonetheless when Coldstream left Camberwell to teach at the Slade School of Art in 1951 Uglow followed him, and remained a student at the Slade until 1954.

Refusing compulsory military service, Uglow was classified as a conscientious objector in 1954, and spent two years undertaking compulsory community work, assisting in the restoration of a war damaged church by Christopher Wren in the City of London, redecorating the house of the artist Patrick George and helping on a farm in Surrey.

Success in art was not immediate, and he did not sell a painting until eight years after leaving art school. During this time he took on a variety of part time teaching jobs, most notably at the Slade from 1961, an institution with which he was to be associated for the rest of his life.

In 1962 he was at the centre of a storm at the municipal art gallery in Bradford, Yorkshire, when a local councillor, Horace Hird, had one of Uglow's paintings, German Girl, removed from an Arts Council exhibition at the gallery. Hird claimed the painting 'offended decency'.

Despite this Uglow was generally a shy artist who shunned publicity as well as honours, including an offer to become a member of the Royal Academy in 1961. However he did become a trustee of the National Gallery in London, in 1991, although in his own words he was generally ignored by the other trustees.

Uglow's first solo show was in 1961 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, but his slow and methodical working method did not lead to a large number of solo shows. In 1969 he exhibited drawings at the Gardener Centre at Sussex University, in 1974 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and then periodically at the Browse & Darby Gallery in London. He did take part in numerous group shows, however, including exhibitions of the London Group and the annual John Moores Prize exhibitions in Liverpool. In 1981 he took part in the exhibition Eight Figurative Painters at the University of Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, USA, and in 1984 in The Hard Won Image at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1992 he featured in the exhibition British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 2000 in the exhibition Encounters at the National Gallery in London. In 2002 a posthumous retrospective was organised by the Arts Council for England, entitled Spotlight on Euan Uglow, which toured around Britain. In 2003 there was a retrospective Euan Uglow: Controlled Passion, Fifty Years of Painting at the Abbot Hall Gallery, in Kendal.

In 1980 Uglow was invited by the artist Stass Paraskos to become the first artist-in-residence at the new Cyprus College of Art arts centre in village of Lempa on the island of Cyprus.

He has work in the collections of the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the National Museum of Wales, the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, Glasgow Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Southampton City Art Gallery, the British Government Art Collection, the Tate Gallery and The Hepworth in Wakefield.

Uglow died of liver cancer at his home in Wandsworth, London on 31 August 2000.

The Estate of Uglow is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, London.