Jenny Grevatte
Jenny Grevatte lives in Leicestershire. She began her career in the 1970s as a painter of small still lives and was discovered by Lillian Browse, when only twenty nine, who gave her her first solo show in her gallery, Browse and Darby, in Cork Street, London.
Many other solo shows have followed, generally one a year, in various well known galleries around the country. In 1991, her fortieth year, she had a retrospective at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. A prestigious solo show followed in 1992 at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, which toured to the Saarland, Germany.
From 1994 to 2007 her work was concerned mainly with landscape. In the last twelve years she has fallen in love with Cornwall and has produced many vibrant paintings of its coast and harbour towns. In 2005 a book of Jenny’s work Landmarks was published by Great Atlantic Publications to coincide with her solo show Drawn To Cornwall.
In November 2010 she showed her work jointly with her ceramicist husband, John Wright, in a show entitled On Reflection at Cambridge Contemporary Art. She now has her work in many public collections.
In the summer of 2010, she had a landmark show entitled ‘A Painter’s Progress’ held at two public venues in Leicester: the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery and the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester University (previously Embrace Arts).
At the New Walk Museum, Jenny showed the work she did whilst Artist in Residence there from 2008/9, responding to the work of artists in the collection; and at Attenborough Arts she showed a retrospective collection of 35 years of her work.
2012 saw Jenny’s first solo exhibition with the Goldmark Gallery which was a great success with more than half the paintings sold. She is now a gallery artist there and had a second show in March 2015 which almost sold out.
Jenny is continually evolving and developing her ideas and methods. Recent themes include trees, sunbathers. hedges, rooks, cliffs and islands, rock pools, swimmers, huts and windows, bookshelves, and, her constant favourite, still life. Scale, format and composition are exciting challenges for her . Her attention sometimes veers toward the abstract, but always with a nod to the world around her.
A documentary about the life and work of Jenny Grevatte produced by her filmmaker son, Alex J. Wright, in 2018. It shows the artist, now in late career, working harder than ever, setting herself new challenges and keeping an eye open on the world around her.
