Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, Courtauld Gallery, 2015

Reviews

Exhilarating, uplifting, startling in their high originality – Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings at the Courtauld Gallery are the revelation of the year. They look like no other pictures of the sky. A part-time glider and full-time artist, drifting and plunging on the thermal currents above his native Cornwall, Lanyon saw earth and air in constant flux from his cockpit and somehow described the experience on canvas. It is no understatement to say that he reinvented landscape painting by taking to the skies.

It has taken half a century for these gliding paintings to appear together, but in his case better late than never. This show, superbly curated by Toby Treves and Barnaby Wright, puts Peter Lanyon back into the ascendant.

Laura Cumming, The Guardian, 25 October 2015