IKON Gallery 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace Birmingham, B1 2HS
Edward Lear | Moment to Moment
“I think that Lear would be as shocked as anyone to find himself on the walls at IKON,” suggests curator Matthew Bevis during this exhibition’s opening. Best known for his nonsense verse, Edward Lear worked as an artist his entire adult life, producing a vast quantity of sketches – “around 9,000 compositions,” notes the catalogue, “roughly one every couple of days over a fifty-year period” – many produced during his restless travels across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Following the success of their recent Carlo Crivelli show, IKON now presents Moment to Moment, the first exhibition dedicated solely to Lear’s landscape drawings, a stunning introduction to an essential body of work. Review by Rowland Bagnall


