Euan Uglow: An Arc from the Eye | MK Gallery
Euan Uglow was a mega-serious artist. That, rather than the beauty or worth of his paintings, is my impression from this exhibition, the first Uglow show in a UK institution for 20 years. The painter’s seriousness across his decades of practice - he was active from the 1940s to his death in 2000 - informed everything he worked on.
And those qualities suit some subjects far better than others. He was great when it came to depicting the still and static. So his landscapes - especially those from summer trips to Turkey and north Cyprus - are the best work here. His still lives are right behind them, like the example below.
Skull (1994-97)
But the famous female nude portraits from the 1970s, with his models in contorted poses and cross-hatched with measurement marks, for which Uglow’s best known, are the least convincing for me.
A documentary made for ITV in 1976, playing in one of the rooms, follows him over six months as he paints a single nude. His seriousness in producing the work, which is far from finished after the six months is up, is total. But on the other hand, I couldn’t help noticing some unsavoury consequences from all that obsessive looking. The model is hooked into place in an unnatural pose for endless hours. At one point in the documentary, you see one literally wrapping her toes around a nail, to maintain the exactitude of the splay the artist demanded. That dedication isn’t reciprocated: at one point, Uglow forgets one of his model’s names.
The first room sets out his influences: a pair of hollow-eyed Coldstream nudes, a Giacometti portrait of his brother Diego, hunched and shadowy in the studio. The works share an interiority and grit that Uglow used, later. He wasn’t very nice to his peers though, daring to call the better-known thick-impasto works of Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach ‘wristy’ - which takes some nerve.
The show culminates in a small still life of a birthday cake, absolutely static and artificial. The notes reveal the original cake was plastic. I took that choice as a joke, a late-career comment on the investment of all that serious scrutiny on previous decades. Then again, was Uglow capable of making a joke?
Euan Uglow: An Arc from the Eye is at MK Gallery (Milton Keynes). 14 February - 31 May 2026