Derrick Greaves
1939 - 2020
Painter and printmaker, born in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Between 1943-48 he was apprenticed as a sign-writer and soon after attended the RCA, London winning the coveted Abbey Major Scholarship in 1954. This afforded him the opportunity to study in Italy where he worked from 1953-53. Greaves held his first solo exhibition at Beaux Arts Gallery, London in 1953 and another followed two years later. He became known as one of the Beaux Arts Quartet, later to be known as the Kitchen Sink School, but he later exchanged the gritty realism of his early style for a more distilled form of image-making, closer in style to that of Patrick Caulfield than any realist.
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His paintings are concise, subtle and often witty. He has shown at the Venice Biennale, 1956 and at the South London Art Gallery and in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum. Several retrospectives have taken place and examples of his works are represented in many public collections at home and abroad. These include the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Tate Gallery, ACGB, BM, CAS, NCAS, Sheffield Art Gallery, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, University of Warwick Art Collection, Johannesburg Art Gallery and Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA. Greaves has taught part-time at St. Martin's School of Art, 1954–64, Maidstone College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools during the 1960’s and was Head of Printmaking at Norwich School of Art 1983–91. His more recent exhibitions include 'Painting Beyond the Millennium' held at the Sidney Cooper Gallery in 2011.
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