A retrospective exhibition filled with ‘wild paintings’ depicting an ‘unrelievedly dark’ world
Peter Howson is an artist who has spent much of his life “tussling with the beast inside”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born in London in 1958 and brought up in Glasgow, he immediately “stood out” when he first began exhibiting his work in the mid-1980s. For one thing, he had been in the Army, an experience that “clearly did something terrible to him” and inspired more than a few of his earliest, already decidedly “bleak” pictures. Secondly, his paintings could hardly have been further from the tasteful, academic art fashionable at the time: rather, they depicted a frightening, ultra-masculine world dominated by violence and ugliness. And as this “tense, sweaty, unhappy, creepy and, eventually, rather brilliant” retrospective in Edinburgh shows, he has not mellowed with age.
