Non Fiction
Category: Art and Photography, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 156
ISBN: 9781854115010
Publication date: October 1, 2009
Price: £20
Out of stock
Ken Elias is one of the leading artists living and working in South Wales. Over the last forty years, he has produced an impressive body of acrylic paintings on canvas and paper, as well as photomontage and mixed media works. Born in Glynneath towards the end of the Second World War, he represents a new generation of artists, of working-class origin, whose childhood was formed in the Fifties and who went to art school in the heady Sixties. He is an artist who, whilst remaining deeply rooted in the visual culture of South Wales, and the Valleys in particular, has always been responsive to and reflecting of the wider world. This complexity has been enhanced by his early experiences of cinema which, together with his love of art and poetry and employment of memory and imagination, informs his striking images.
Ken Elias: Thin Partitions looks at Elias’s whole career to date and coincides with a major retrospective exhibition. It brings together a set of new essays by Hugh Adams, David Briers, Jon Gower, Anne Price-Owen and Ceri Thomas, introduced by a masterly foreword by his Tonypandy-born contemporary Professor Dai Smith. Elias has exhibited widely in Wales, the UK and Europe. His work is represented in the principal art collections of Wales, as well as private collections.
Ceri Thomas
Ceri Thomas is a freelance artist, art historian and curator. From 2007 to 2017, he was curator of the Oriel y Bont gallery at the University of South Wales and of its museum-status art collection both of which focus upon the visual culture of modern and contemporary south Wales. An award-winning artist and art historian, he has curated the Wales touring exhibitions ‘Ernest Zobole: a retrospective’, ‘Joan Baker: a retrospective’ and ‘Mapping the Welsh Group at 60’. He has also co-curated the Wales touring exhibitions ‘Ken Elias: a retrospective’ and ‘Alan Salisbury: a retrospective’ and curated several other individuals’ retrospectives at the University of South Wales including those of Michael Freeman, Ronald Lawrence and Bryn Richards as well as the general surveys ‘In Our Own image? A Century of Imaging of and in South Wales: 1910-2013’, ‘Towards Abstraction: Art in South Wales since 1960’ and ‘Coal Society’. He has spoken at the Hay Festival on Ernest Zobole and Ken Elias.
