Oliver Bevan

Bevan's first solo exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery, London, in 1965 featured eight Op Art paintings with hard edges and colour fields in black, white and shades of grey, plus red and blue in Both Ways 1 and 2.

[12] This led Bevan to experiment with Polaroid as a medium for other types of kinetic art, and in 1973 he produced the first of his lightboxes using polarising filters and fluorescent tubes, with more complex versions employing electric motors and sets of slowly rotating discs.

Between 1974 and 1978 Bevan's chromatropic or 'time' paintings were exhibited in London, Zurich, Detroit and Toronto, with pieces such as Turning World, Crescendo, Sunspot and Co-Incidence (now in the Government Art Collection[14]) winning plaudits from Ernst Gombrich and others.

[18] On returning to London from Canada in 1979, Bevan rented a top-floor studio near Smithfield Market in Farringdon and became 'a painter of modern life', citing Manet, Degas and Sickert as influences along with the urban realism of New Objectivity ('Neue Sachlichkeit') in Germany and Edward Hopper and the Ashcan School in New York.

The latter presented Bevan's paintings of the Westway flyover, an elevated dual carriageway in west London that had captivated him when his car broke down and was towed to a garage in the sunless and somewhat alienating space between the road's concrete stanchions.

According to the writer Will Self, Bevan 'was entranced by the shapes the flyover's decks described and embarked on a series of large-scale canvases that elegantly capture the strange dichotomies the road represents: its beauty and its terror, its light and its darkness'.

A solo exhibition, Urban Mirror, at the Royal National Theatre in 1997 continued his exploration of the painted city, with the writer Peter Ackroyd comparing Bevan's work to that of 'Auerbach and Kossoff, who have a genuine painterly reverence for the real features of the streets and the people.