Trevor Sutton went to art school in the 1960s and has, from the outset, remained a non-figurative painter and printmaker. He has been inspired by artists like Turner, Monet and Rothko – and musicians like Miles Davis, John Surman and Captain Beefheart.
In the 1980s, he worked on multi-part units of painted shapes, the most notable of which were first shown at the Lisson Gallery in 1981.
From the 1990s onwards, Trevor’s paintings present remote and evocative abstract spaces in which to place one’s own imaginings. Their character lies captured between layer upon layer of semi-transparent oil-based glazes that build up a visible history of colour and brush marks. This process gives the work a physical and an atmospheric quality but does not provide specific pictorial or geographic detail.
Trevor has exhibited widely in the USA, Japan, Germany, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland, as well as British venues such as Tate Britain, the Serpentine Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, Ikon Gallery, Fruitmarket Gallery, Arnolfini, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and Whitechapel Art Gallery.