Never afraid to embrace life as a learning process, Johannesburg born Minne Fry’s work has consistently both embraced and expressed change in a medium where the continuity of the ‘trademark’ brush stroke have long been held to be the norm. Having firstly built a substantial reputation based on her work in oils, Fry then began using watercolours in the 1980’s and furthermore went on to study printmaking at Morley College. Hers is a remarkable talent. Having first come to prominence in 1958 with her exhibition at London’s New Vision Centre, Minne Fry’s work continues to excite and also to garner both critical and commercial acclaim - in 2001 she was amongst britart’s top ten selling artists, worked under the patronage of the South African Embassy to commemorate President Mandela’s visit to London and also won an Aya Broughton painting prize at the Westminster Gallery. It’s not hard to see why Fry has enjoyed such continued success.
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Her semi-abstract landscapes are the very definition of what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins referred to as ‘inscapes’; emotional responses that, although derived from external reality, steer clear of the direct depiction of the traditional landscape. In this way, Fry has taken landscape painting a step further with her work often reminiscent of late period Turner with the awesome power and beauty of nature captured in a vivid energy flash of colour and emotion combined. There are very few artists who can claim to have been at the cutting edge of British art for over 40 years; Minne Fry is one of them.