Emyr Williams reviews the exhibition Peter Lanyon: The Mural Studies at Gimpel Fils, London, on view through January 18, 2014.

Williams writes: "The works on show at Gimpel Fils focus on this little known aspect of his work. The exhibition includes the final large-scale gouache sketches for the Liverpool and Birmingham murals, as well as other studies and work derived from Lanyon’s exploration of the medium. These large works have a relatively understated sense of colour overtly informed by landscape signage (punctuated by the odd primary) and all sharing black as a common unifier… [After 1956] Lanyon gradually employed a more gestural open-ended brushstroke based painting, sweating out his early constructivist works. However a move into fully abstract works was – maybe suspiciously – avoided. Instead he sought invention in his responses to the spaces he knew so well."