Anthony Banks
Works on Paper

Anthony Banks Works on Paper is the gallery’s first off-site exhibition, which will take place at Drake’s on Savile Row.

Presenting 25 new works on paper, Anthony Banks’ exhibition at Drake’s celebrates an artist at the forefront of contemporary British painting, within a haberdasher underpinned by outstanding craftsmanship. The show encompasses several years of making and an important part of the artist’s practice: working on paper, which holds a lightness of touch and immediacy that is often lost on canvas.

“At Drakes, we don’t rush things… whether it’s the clothes we make or the art we appreciate. So when Anthony Banks, whose paintings can take years to complete, agreed to show upstairs, we were all in. He’s a man who doesn’t compromise on his craft, and neither do we. It’s that kind of commitment we respect. Anthony Banks’ work is a clever mix of colour, pattern, and references to art history  – without feeling stuffy or dated. It’s contemporary, but with a nod to what came before. Much like our approach to design, there’s always room for the classics, but they’ve got to evolve.

Banks’ paintings are like journeys etched onto their surface, chronicling the slow, winding passage from the familiar to the unknown and back again. These works themselves seem to echo the path of a traveller returning home, their sprawling compositions mirroring the return from distant places. They map not just the evolving face of the English landscape – its changing industries, its quiet waterways, its shifting stillness – but also ask us to measure the distance between the versions of ourselves that emerge when we return to the places that have shaped us. Beyond the work, Anthony is also one of us – an excellent customer, a man of impeccable taste, and a chap who looks just as good in our clothes as his paintings do on our walls. We’re proud to showcase his work here, and we’re excited to share it with you.”

– Foreword by Michael Hill, co-owner of Drake’s

‘Remember’ advised the French painter Maurice Denis, ‘that a picture – before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.’ Looking at Anthony Banks’ paintings, it’s indeed easy to forget they were ever flat surfaces. He butters and carves his oils over the canvas then daubs, replaces, erases – “The paintings can be exhausted into working”. But here, with his works on paper (all created between 2021-2025), there’s not that same margin for error. The light quality of the substrate itself (paper) needs to be preserved and, as such, they can’t be over-laboured: “they either work or they don’t”. In other modes, one gets the sense that Banks’ art grows out of art, but, here, there’s a dynamic kind of resolve at play – a hint of adrenaline.

Banks’ differing mediums – oil paint, oil pastel, watercolour, wax, ink, acrylic, graphite, collage – make room for, in the artist’s words, a certain “looseness / decisiveness”. But certain works, despite their paper grounding, still retain a feel of (to borrow from Baudelaire) ‘luxury, calm, and voluptuousness’. Steam Liner (Table Mountain), Evening Landscape, and Mountains and River, are all set behind or within abstracted borders, reminiscent of the framing devices Howard Hodgkin’s incorporated into his work in the late 70s and 80s. The borders help to inform and colour our understanding of the landscapes within, while simultaneously reinstating distance through design – the scenes are expansive yet controlled.

Whereas, in other compositions, such as Frigate, Banks disintegrates borders. In Train (Mallard) the locomotive plumes light grey steam over a loosely geometric, ash-orange background of circles and triangles. Incised areas allow the background to show through – a process of controlled integration between layers that helps rather than hinders the work’s momentum, the connected planes creating a sense of directional simultaneity and depth. Indeed, Banks uses cut-outs widely in his works on paper. In Blue Lighthouse the traditionally cylindrical beacon is rendered as jagged negative space, sharp and defined above the scrawled sea. And in Barge (Thames), Banks rejects stippling and sgraffito techniques most commonly used to recreate the river’s riffling, undulating service, opting instead for a complex of lanceolate cut-outs that produce the effect of light bouncing and shimmering off the water. In this way, Banks’ cut-outs often speak more to the delicacy and deftness of, say, Eileen Agar, than the declarative cut-outs of Matisse.

Banks’ contrastive mediums – watercolour and oil pastel, for example – compound and emphasise his contrastive compositions wherein the real and surreal elide. It’s this odd aesthetic of contrastivity that reminds me of the poet John Ashbery. I read the following account of Ashbery’s style around the same moment I first saw Banks’ works on paper, and was struck by a certain descriptive apposition: [a] simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery droughts of obscurity and languor. (Stephen Koch)

Banks also prefers to keep his significations hazy, moving between ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’, gesturing toward a field of experience without ever fully articulating it. Little hints at legibility – decidedly cut lines of layered collage, the occasional bold, declarative gesture of a tree, cloud, bird, vase – latch one eye and allow the other to stray over indeterminate planes and washed swathes of colour. Indeed, in Factory, Evening Landscape, and Reeds and Sunset, Banks’ figuration is so abridged we need titles to sketch the scenes within. In this way, the works put forward a kind of half-glimpsed truth.

Saying this, figuration is sometimes handled a little differently. Animals, in particular, are approached with an implicit confidence – both in terms of their anatomical expression and inherent value as subjects. In what sometimes feels like esteem, Banks brings animals right to the fore. In Fox, River and City, a (green) fox treads quietly through a twilit scene. A pale river runs. Here, we can track aspects of Banks’ compositional process; the russet earth is painted carefully around the contours of the fox’s legs, suggesting the animal’s form was rendered first. In fact, the way the brown brushstrokes and the curve of the river echo the sweep of the fox’s body visually suggests the animal holds power over the landscape, that its presence shapes and informs its expression. In this way, Banks’ compositional prioritisation and almost pantheistic intertwining of animals and their environs is reminiscent of the German Expressionist Franz Marc – but while Marc’s animals stood for an ideal pre-industrialised age of innocence, Banks’ creatures feel contemporary, or, more precisely, perennial.

Five of Banks’ pieces feature birds, their archetypical forms evoking both parietal art and the herons that study the Thames today. The marble dusted, pigmented paper and the simple forms of the birds lend these, and all the paper works, a ceramic quality – I’m thinking here of Picasso’s early ornithological pottery.

Wading Bird and Bird and Stream also seem to owe something to British painter Mary Fedden and her standing blackbirds, seagulls, plovers, and robins  – but Banks’ birds are more indeterminate, less scrutable: their genericism keeps them from sentimentalisation. With their protracted beaks and gangly legs, at once alert and reposeful, Banks’ birds have instead a portentous look. Despite his warmer palette and faintly Fauvist, thistle-toned purples, these aren’t utopic representations but, to borrow Thomas Hardy’s phrase, ‘neutral tinted’, ambiguous scenes. Without titles, it’s unclear whether that semicircle sun on the horizon is half-set or half-risen. Though, saying this, in his most recent bird study, Finch, Branch, Mountain, Banks’ colour palette is warmer, more vibrant. He depicts the finch in carmine – the same red used for Fishing Boat with Moon, also painted just this year. While the other bird portraits emanate a mute stillness, this finch, burnished and bright, might well be warbling out its rambling song.

Both Pineapple and Wildflowers are still life paintings, though of different kinds. In Wildflowers, Banks pays homage to the tradition of flower painting; but unlike abundant Dutch Golden Age bouquets, three discrete stems balance fragilely in their vase, a minimalist arrangement more Mapplethorpe than Brueghel. Banks’ flowers are sketched with simple confidence in a faux-naïf style. The scene from which these stems have presumably been picked is loosely rendered behind the flowers – a stream curls into a moonlit hill, a cloud and crescent moon hang in the sky. While Wildflowers appears to have been carefully composed, the louder Pineapple operates differently. In 1535, historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés wrote of the fruit that ‘my pen and my words cannot depict such exceptional qualities, nor appropriately celebrate’ it: filling the whole sheet, Banks’ pineapple feels like such a celebration, its spiked leaves fireworks across the paper.

Banks exaggerates its form – the pineapple’s base almost spherical, green leaves curving improbably – and enjoys a fast, free hand. Georgia O’Keeffe went to Hawaii to paint pineapples, but depicted them as buds: small, delicate things. Pineapple, to my mind, is singular – I can’t think of a comparative recent painting that portrays the tropical plant so boldly.

Like Shara Hughes’ invented landscapes, Banks’ more architectural works – Modernist House, Chimney Vase, Factory and Coastal Industry – bend and frustrate our expectations of industrial and metropolitan topography. But, while Hughes’ landscapes are impulsively but gradually established, Banks’ are often assembled in just a few moves, as in Factory, where only a few intersecting lines floating disconnectedly on the horizon represent the factory, itself seeping into a green smog. Contrastingly, in Modernist House, the curved building seems to beam at us, triumphant, its rounded facade bursting out beneath the bright sun – Banks’ topographies have personalities.

Many of these works on paper have the quality of a dream on first waking – when, for a few seconds, its imagery is vivid and its emotion acute, even confronting. One such work is Volcano (Island): molten lava has begun to spew from the fissure, while, above, a pink downpour flows from a cobalt cloud. The landscape is charged with a kind of tectonic, electric interconnectivity, itself amplified by the mirroring of the scene in the water. A tall orange figure, somewhere between a bird and a man looms to the left – or is it a scorched tree? A streak of sunrise reflected in dew? Compositionally, the work recalls Andy Warhol’s Vesuvius (1985) – but while Warhol’s explosion is epical and filmic, Banks’ cut-out abstractions make for a subtler, more illusory eruption.

Despite the immediacy and freshness of the works in this exhibition, Banks started preparing and thinking about the series seven years ago, when he first primed the paper. These aren’t preliminary studies but finished works in their own right – lively, full realisations of simple but not simplistic ideas and thoughts, luminously articulated in Banks’ idiosyncratic language of ir/regular forms.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matilda Sykes