His name may be synonymous with contemporary British art, but would you be able to recognise Antony Gormley?

Tony Bevan, another of the nation’s most important living artists whose work is held by the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, The British Museum and MOMA New York, should be an easier man to spot: he is a painter for whom the human head, most notably his own, has dominated 20 years’ work.

Yet despite his statement that there is a degree of self-portraiture in all his work, his body is only his source material – the heads he paints are not the same as the one he sees every morning in the mirror.

His paintings often involve distorted facial features recorded in photographic studies, which emphasize his nose or chin. The heads are generally without bodies, and face seems an exterior structure, like a building’s façade.

Another factor is the Bradford-born artist’s scale. This new exhibition at Bexhill’s De La Warr features paintings taken from his drawings of sculptures. They take up all the pavilion’s Gallery 2 walls.

“On occasion I’ve felt the need to take paintings beyond a particular size and into a colossal scale,” Bevan says. “That opportunity has arisen at De La Warr, with its high ceilings and expansive wall space. At certain times subjects have to go beyond the life-size.”

The three colossal works in his New Painting Installation offer a glimpse into his past as a painter of portraits and as well as a vision of his abstract concerns and architectural subjects, such as corridors and rafters with a disturbing, uncomfortable presence.

The largest work measures 12ft by 22ft, and such is their size Bevan’s first full view of them was as they were hung on the gallery wall.

He says it’s as much of a challenge to obtain canvases at that size as it is to paint them. He executes the painting and drawing on his studio floor, American style, as Jackson Pollock did, and literally works inside his works, often leaving traces of his knees and hands visible on the canvas or paper.

“I need that physical contact with the painting,” he says. “They are almost like body prints.”

It was always his intention to use the De La Warr space for these pieces. He is a passionate advocate of modernism – “All artists are influenced by all forms of art, they take from other artists and they take from life”–- and lives in an art deco building in London.

The first painting of the installation was inspired by his recent travels to China – in particular his experience of the Giant Buddha of Leshan, a sculpture carved into sandstone.

“I went to China two years ago with the Red Mansion Foundation and while I was there I visited this colossal Buddha,” he says.

“It was carved into the hillside at the base of a river by a single monk. You can approach by the river or by foot from the side, which is the way I took. When you get to the hill it is almost like looking at Ayers Rock, such is the scale, but you can get very close. You approach the summit, which is the top of Buddha’s head, made up of curls of hair that become like calligraphy. Each curl is different and, interestingly, these curls are actually snail shells, which signify Buddha’s holiness.”

Bevan says the sculpture’s immensity overwhelmed him as he noticed details one might overlook at a smaller scale.

His ongoing interest in character heads is explored in the two other installation paintings. They show the influence of German-Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, whose work Bevan first encountered as a student at London’s Goldsmith’s College. Bevan lauds Messerschmidt’s sculptures’ ability to remain contemporary, even though they were made 270 years ago.

These works are not figurative, but neither are they entirely abstract, in that the imaginary has been broken down into a series of painterly gestures divorced from the actual visible world. Bevan says Messerschmidt’s sculptures have “percolated” into these new self portraits.

“This is a sculptor born in 1736, one of 34 children. Towards the end of his short life he lived in isolation and made these life-sized heads. The power of those has stayed with me since I wrote my art school thesis on him. It’s only recently I’ve been making these self portraits but through Messerschmidt, and in the particular forms of Messerschmidt, that’s how these recent works have evolved.”

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