Bawden's Beasts
10th February 2018 – 27th January 2019
Edward Bawden Gallery – Free Entry
Edward Bawden (1903-1989) Aesop's Fables: Ant and Grasshopper, 1970 Copyright The Edward Bawden Estate
The creatures that inhabit Bawden’s work reveal his extraordinary talent for visual expression and storytelling, often using the simplest of lines. Inventive and humorous, Bawden put animals great and small to work in his commissions for book illustrations, advertisements and posters, in which they adopt human guises for their amusing antics: a giraffe dons a blazer, cravat and boater to advertise British Petroleum and an army of ants armed with mops and brooms adorns the cover of Take The Broom. Wallpaper designs, drawings, prints and murals reveal Bawden’s fascination with animals and marine life, anthropomorphic insects and the macabre. The exhibition will feature Bawden’s work in a range of media throughout the course of his career, including his imaginative advertisements for Fortnum & Mason, and evocative prints of Aesop’s Fables.