Paul Huxley: ‘I have more fun making sculpture than making paintings, but I’ve made paintings all my life’

The artist talks about his career, from visiting Robert Motherwell and Lee Krasner in New York in the 1960s, to his wall drawings for the Azerbaijan pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, to his new work for a forthcoming show in Santa Fé, his first solo exhibition in the US for nearly 40 years

Trained at Harrow College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in the 1950s, Paul Huxley (b1938) grew up immersed in American culture and art. The US was then still an expensive destination, to which few people travelled, and Huxley smiles as he remembers how unreal it all felt. Then, in 1964, he won a Stuyvesant travel award and found himself in New York, with the then curator of the Whitechapel Gallery, Bryan Robertson, who introduced him to the likes of Robert Motherwell and Lee Krasner.

Returning for two further years on a Harkness fellowship, Huxley was able to realise his ambitions of working on a large scale, creating abstract paintings and developing his vocabulary of shapes and gestures. After Huxley was included in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1967 and a Museum of Modern Art travelling exhibition in 1968, the Kornblee Gallery in New York mounted two solo exhibitions of his work in 1967 and 1970. Since then, he has been based in London, and his forthcoming exhibition at David Richard Gallery, Santa Fé, New Mexico, will be his first stateside solo show in nearly 40 years.

Paul Huxley: Recent Paintings After Venice Biennale
David Richard Gallery, Santa Fé, New Mexico
12 January – 20 February 2016

Interview by ANNA McNAY
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY