Nicholas Treadwell

Against the contemporary trend of Hard-edge abstraction and Minimalism, the gallery focused on "the basic nature of the human condition",[7] and quickly gained a controversial reputation.

[7] In 1971, Art and Artist magazine said of one show: "The place blisters with work of searing eroticism, high camp, coarse belly laughs and hideous vulgarity".

[1] In 1978, he acquired Denne Hill, a mansion with 52 rooms, designed by George Devey and built in 1871–75,[8] in Womenswold between Canterbury and Dover; restoration took two years but it was opened to the public in July 1980.

[3] Ben Moss, in his book Four Funerals and a Wedding, wrote: The actual imagery of the superhumanists, while striking, and sometimes shocking, reflected the contemporary feelings of the Western experience.

The artists, while portraying their ideas in aesthetically different ways, shared a desire to convey the moving nature of their subject matter in an understandably vivid manner.

[7]In 1981, Treadwell's stand at the FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain) at the Grand Palais in Paris was deemed "deplorable and very popular" by Richard Shone in The Burlington Magazine.

[11] In the early 1990s Treadwell discovered a new wave of young talent emerging from British art schools, most notably two graduates working with extraordinarily disturbed figuration.

"[12] In 1998, John Windsor in The Independent said that the work of the Young British Artists seemed tame compared with that of the "shock art" of the 1970s, including "kinky outrages" at the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, amongst which were a "hanging, anatomically detailed leather straitjacket, complete with genitals", titled Pink Crucifixion, by Mandy Havers.

"[14] Treadwell wrote a letter to The Guardian saying that Searle's "dismissive language in relation to major works by the visionary artists Robert Knight and Malcolm Poynter, for instance, is inexplicable".