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attain a remarkable originality, demonstrating painting after painting that an impressionist style, supposedly superseded by the forward thrust of modernity and postmodernity, retained great validity.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.
‘I am not a painter of ideas, I am a painter of direct visual 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’