The Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art is delighted to announce that it will be originating and touring the first major retrospective of Alfred Wolmark's work for over 20 years in the autumn of 2004.

The Ben Uri has a distinguished history of hosting exhibitions by Wolmark - his work was the cornerstone of the Zangwill memorial exhibition in 1935, and there were two notable exhibitions during Wolmark's lifetime (in 1948 and 1952), as well as a memorial exhibition in 1961. It is also wholly appropriate that the exhibition should tour to the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, host of the last major museum retrospective in 1975, and owner of Wolmark's striking portrait of his patron Anna Wilmersdoerffer.

This exhibition, the fourth in the Ben Uri ongoing series 'The Whitechapel Boys', provides a rare opportunity to consider Wolmark's work within its broadest context. Loans will be drawn from the Ben Uri permanent collection and both private and public sources, including the Tate and National Portrait Galleries and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans. More than 50 works will represent the full range of Wolmark's oeuvre, many of which have not been previously exhibited, or have remained unseen for a generation. These works will range from his earliest religious paintings - Rembrandtesque in execution and characterised by an intense compassion for his Jewish subjects - through to the glorious outpouring of colourist work, dating from his honeymoon in Concarneau, Brittany in 1911, and explored throughout the 1920s in a series of highly-coloured canvases, which demonstrate a vigorous handling of paint.

Highlights include Wolmark's two dramatic portraits of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, one of the early twentieth century's most important modernist sculptors, which will be exhibited alongside Gaudier-Brzeska's own portrait bust of Wolmark. The exhibition will also include examples of Wolmark's painted ceramics, sculpture, book illustrations and poster design, as well as a number of works which demonstrate the breadth of his artistic experimentation, showing influences as diverse as the Camden Town Group, German Expressionism and Wyndham Lewis.

A substantial, fully illustrated, colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Curators: Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson

For more information and images please contact Elinor Kaye Tel: 020 7604 3991 email: elinor@benuri.org.uk