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During the interwar period, Ivon Hitchens exhibited with the Seven and Five Society in London, a group of young avant-garde artists, which included Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and John Piper, that sought an alternative to both the fashionable Bloomsbury Group and the dominant London Group. Although Hitchens shared their interest in abstraction, he remained committed to a tradition of English landscape painting, but inflected by his appreciation for Paul Cézanne. After his London house was hit by a bomb in 1940, Hitchens relocated to West Sussex, where he remained for the rest of his career. Here he developed a style of landscape painting typified by wide oblong canvases depicting woodland scenes, represented by a mixture of very broad and narrow brushstrokes.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016