About IAP Fine Art
IAP Founder David Tregunna
Founded in East London in 1994 by arts writer, curator and collector, David Tregunna, IAP Fine Art is an established contemporary fine art gallery and fine art print publisher. Over many years, we have liaised with and assisted several national museums in curating Chris Gollon's solo shows (including Ferens Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, St Paul's Cathedral and River & Rowing Museum). Museums and public collections have purchased Gollon's work from us, and we have also shown at ART Chicago and various London art fairs. In 1998, we also started working with Maggi Hambling, initially publishing editions of fine art prints, and more recently exhibiting oil paintings, monotypes and watercolours.
Having been based in London's East End for many years, in 2007, we opened a new, three-space, two-floor gallery in a Victorian building at 65, Roman Rd, London. Curator and art consultant Cindy Rubbens now manages exhibitions and enquiries. (As we reach more collectors in Europe, enquiries in German or Dutch can be addressed to cindy@iapfineart.com and those in French or English to david@iapfineart.com).
Gallery Philosophy by David Tregunna, Director, IAP Fine Art:
“The gallery philosophy is a very simple one: we believe in painting. We think that in the right artist’s hands, it can have something important to say about the human condition. At its best, and in any era, great painting is exciting. It can take us somewhere we haven’t been before, provoking us into new areas of thought and feeling.
I have enjoyed some conceptual art, particularly that of the 60s and 70s, but find much of it since then to be repetitive and boring, or simply about small or very obvious ideas. One bright exception was Michael Landy’s ‘installation’ in the late 1990s in the old C&A building on Oxford Street, London’s main shopping street. Not sure if we should call it an installation or performance art or a happening, since he employed people with industrial grinders to destroy every single possession he had, from childhood photos to his car and his last pair of underpants. After weeks of the process, when nothing was left, he walked out naked. Brilliant, I thought. Reminded me of how torturers eventually strip people to nothing, asked questions about what makes our notion of identity, and amusingly, on a busy shopping street, destroyed every type of consumable most of us have. Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times also rightly made a parallel to the disrobing of Christ. Sadly, although I do keep an open mind, have enjoyed much conceptual art from earlier periods, and do keep going to shows in London, I can’t find a hit like that again from recent conceptual art. Also, gallery people and the media keep trying to blind me with the price tag, or the fact it’s been shown in this or that trendy gallery, before I can look properly at anything to see if it’s any good.
These same people have said painting is dead. The art world in London seems to me to be divided into certain camps, and in some of them, they think figurative painting has nothing more to say, and that it died. I think that is ridiculous. In other camps, I can see painting is dead, or at best numbed. The craft is there perhaps, although not particularly innovatively, but there is no great imagery or imagination, just a dull obsession with getting the craft right over and above whether the image moves us or has anything to offer humanity's understanding of itself.
However, I have a lifelong love of painting and know that in certain periods of history, for example the High Renaissance, people did not think that painting could go on from there. Then along came Mannerism, Baroque and one can trace a line to Expressionism. If people had decided painting was dead back then, we’d have no Rubens, no Goya, and no Picasso. It takes time, and thought, and innovation to refresh an established art form. Just because a new art form like conceptual art appears, it does not mean painting is dead. Far from it, the great contemporary painters just try to make painting equally new and exciting. I can see why Robert Hughes thought this of Robert Rauschenberg.
I think the same of Chris Gollon’s paintings, and in 1994 founded IAP Fine Art to show his work, and his work alone. It was a strange gallery, with one artist, with shows changing as work sold; but people loved it, and also his museum shows were very well attended by the public. Critical recognition of his work and public acquisitions continue to increase. Personally, I believe he is inventing a new way of seeing.
Like all areas of our lives, the art world is affected by the fashions it creates, and I have long admired the maverick nature of Maggi Hambling. She made her reputation before people started to say painting was dead. She was First Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, but eschewed commercial galleries or the trends therein, and stayed true to herself. Her spirit of freedom was akin to our own, and we are pleased she is now associated with us. We hold a large body of her work and run her official information website.
My gallery now exists in an art world that is controlled by the international imperialism of the art market, the latter recently very cogently described by Robert Hughes in his documentary ‘The Mona Lisa Curse’. I think all great art, whether conceptual or painting, should be born from experience and life, and have something to say about both. Sadly, over recent decades, it has become money driven, celebrity obsessed, in a media culture of consumption. The art market is one of the last unregulated markets in the world. Self-interested, self-promoting collectors and dealers use the public art auctions to bid up the ‘art’ they deem art, making art into an insider-traded commodity. I think this is a dangerous trend, and leads to people (even in certain museums) to admire art not through any critical perspective, but through the price tag, and the attendant celebrity/media hype. I agree with Robert Hughes that this trend may well kill art completely. The prices try to strike us blind as to the true aesthetic or moral worth of the piece, often because without that they are often very mediocre or dully obvious.
Despite the ebb and flow of art world fashions, our belief in painting has remained unchanged for 15 years. We have a loyal and growing national and international following of collectors and public who agree with our view. With regard to pricing and our gallery policy, we are transparent and open. As exposed in many a national newspaper of late, we know the crazy auction prices for commercial 'brands' like Hirst, Koons, Warhol and certain others are all artificially constructed, and are nothing to do with demand and supply.
Of course, the price of great artists’ work accrues in value. When recognition and press attention increases, demand outstrips supply (unless you start a Warhol-style Factory, or a Hirst-style studio filled with assistants and so get others to churn it out). Most great artists did the work themselves, so there is a finite limit to supply. Even with those artists, such as Rubens, who used apprentices, it's still clear which bits he did, due to the flair, 'bigness' and sheer beauty and brilliance of the artist in paint.
Robert Hughes said in ‘The Curse of the Mona Lisa’ that at 71, he remembers a time when you could look at paintings in a museum without a thought as to their monetary value. He also remembered a time when serious art was not beyond those of modest means. I am careful in my own gallery to explain that if you buy work by Chris Gollon or Maggi Hambling, of course they will rise in value over time through demand and supply and genuine critical acclaim. However, we neither view the paintings as a commodity, nor play about with art markets. Instead, my staff and I enjoy actually looking at the paintings and discussing them with the artists, within our circle of collectors, critics or with the public. We raise prices according to demand and supply and genuine recognition by serious art critics and museums.
We only show and sell work by two artists, manage their official information websites, and offer a very in-depth knowledge of their work to collectors, to museums and to the general public. I write this philosophy to clarify our position in the middle of very strange, chaotic and uncertain times when 'art as commodity' has taken over from 'art as art'. IAP Fine Art stands firmly for the latter. Without putting down any other form of art, our own preference happens to be for one art form: painting.”
