Sargy Mann

Sargy Mann (29 May 1937-5 April 2015) was one of the most extraordinary British artists of his generation. Both a landscape and figurative painter, his diverse works are recognisable by their bright colour palette and focus on light. Although deeply influenced by Cézanne and Bonnard, his paintings attain a remarkable originality, demonstrating painting after painting that an impressionist style, supposedly superseded by the forward thrust of modernity and postmodernity, retained great validity. Mann was always interested, both from an artistic and scientific perspective, in the perception of light and colour as a subjective phenomenon. His paintings capture this desire to represent an experience of light and space in two-dimensional form. 

Later in life, his sight began to progressively worsen. Undeterred, Mann continued to find new ways of seeing and interpreting his experience of light and space. In this period of his life he sought out brighter light qualities in India and Spain, his ‘Cadaques’ paintings were the first he made after losing his sight completely in 2005. Using dictaphones, blue tac and touch to aid his artistic practices, Mann continued to paint, translating touch and memory into artworks. As someone who had always been preoccupied with the subjectivity of sight, he was now unbound, able to elevate his lifetime of looking to a new experience.

‘The paradox was that now that I had no perceptual experience of light or colour, I was free to use colour completely intuitively in order to express whatever experience I did have’ 

Trained at the Camberwell School of Art, Sargy Mann was greatly influenced by his teachers Dick Lee, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow. The scenes of his subsequent years can be found in his paintings; from Regent’s Park and Lemmons House to Suffolk and India. Mann began exhibiting his works with Cadogan Contemporary in 1987, completing eighteen exhibitions with the gallery overall.