Liss Llewellyn is excited to announce the exhibition Stephenson: Slightly Apart in collaboration with Three Highgate Arts Foundation.

Groups such as Unit 1 and the Seven and Five Society gathered in and around Hampstead, forming a shifting but highly active centre of artistic exchange. Among them was John Cecil Stephenson – a slightly older figure in relation to artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, connected to this circle yet never fully absorbed by it. Stephenson’s position within this environment is telling. In 1935, his work appeared in Axis: Quarterly Review of Contemporary Abstract Painting and Sculpture alongside Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Klee, Malevich and Mondrian. Many of these artists passed briefly through Hampstead. Stephenson, however, remained – and became increasingly engaged with one of the central artistic questions of the time: the relationship between abstraction and figuration.