University of Cambridge

Winner of the Peter Stuyvesant Award in 1966 - and one of the artists involved in Bryan Robertson's hugely influential New Generation shows of the 1960s - Hosking's work has developed through a constant questioning of the nature and relevance of painting.

Born in 1944 in Devon, he was educated at Exeter College of Art and Design and finished his formal training at the London Central School of Art and Design in 1966. It was in this year that he won the Peter Stuyvesant Award.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Hosking has been working steadily ever since, progressing from large self-referential abstract largely monochromatic paintings towards a more sophisticated and personalized, semi-representational format.

Hosking's work has developed through a constant questioning of the nature and relevance of painting. Using the rural landscape around him as his source material, through the Devonshire countryside of his youth and more recently that which surrounds his Midlands home, he has arrived at a kind of abstracted topographical language. The resulting work can be said to combine and balance poetic intuition with straight-forward ideas.

Barry Phipps, Exhibitions Curator at Churchill, said: "Charred, ashes, crosses, markers, a craggy landscape, elsewhere, a snow storm, flotsam and jetsam left behind by the tide or a storm; these all come to mind standing in the glow or wake or shadow of Knighton Hosking's often dense and sometimes epic paintings.

"Hosking carries his paintings in his paintings along with everything else in his life. They are part of his story, part of his journey. Bits of shapes, words, figures of sorts that reference the things that matter to him. These are all there in the paintings; relics, touchstones, stains, souvenirs, heirlooms, mementos. All the things that shape a persons life.

"There are also his beliefs, his dreams, his hopes, his heartbreaks. It is a kind of attempt to understand the world and elsewhere. Not much different from any of us, really, but Knighton chooses to paint through these thoughts. And it is all in the paint; trapped in its amber, laid out on its clay flats, singing its song, for all who will listen.

"I genuinely think this is one of the best exhibitions that Churchill has ever had. It looks fantastic."

Entrance to the exhibition is free between 9am-5pm.

Reproduced courtesy University of Cambridge Office of Communications