We Know She Knows: Albert Herbert (1925-2008)

December 2020 – January 2021 / Online

This online exhibition introduces some of the idiosyncratic and inventive etchings made by the artist Albert Herbert in the 1970s and ’80s. These etchings are supplemented by a selection of drawings and lyrical works on paper from later in his career.

When Albert Herbert was teaching at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1960s and ’70s, it was a centre for the avant-garde. Herbert invited Yoko Ono to give a performance lecture to the students, and his colleagues and friends included the pioneering conceptual artist, John Latham. Herbert had been painting in a representational way since leaving the Royal College of Art in the 1950s, but in the late 1960s he repressed his drive to make images that tell stories and made a series of paintings covered with abstracted, indecipherable texts and experimented with photography.

Eventually he found that he ‘couldn’t paint at all’ and intuitively wanted to find a way back to figuration. He found it in etching, which he worked at intensively over a ten-year period. ‘I used to creep down to the etching room in the basement at St Martin’s and work at these little prints, literary, illustrative, with bits of theology hiding behind childish jokes; all the opposite of what my modernist colleagues were teaching on the top floor.’ The title of this exhibition is taken from one of these playful etchings where Herbert alliterates ‘nose’ and ‘knows’.

Games with words and primitive graffiti were followed by a series of etchings of Trafalgar Square in which he revealed symbolic, archetypal forms such as ‘that feminine dome of the National Gallery, and that eternal river flowing at the bottom by Charing Cross’. When he began to paint again, he retained the habit of ‘working small’ from making prints.

Albert Herbert was an artist with a powerful and original poetic vision. In a career spanning five decades, his seemingly naïve yet sophisticated paintings and works on paper were the result of his life-long journey exploring ‘what lies beneath the surface of the mind’.

Link to obituary in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jun/11/art

Link to obituary in The Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/albert-herbert-artist-of-powerful-poetic-vision-831051.html