19/06/2026
‘Case History’, a group exhibition featuring works by Mike Nelson, Tanoa Sasraku, David Bomberg, Gillies Adamson Semple, Nicolas Deshayes, Kira Freije, Magali Reus, Niamh O’Malley, Anthony Caro, Prunella Clough, and Alex Margo Arden, is on view at Vardaxoglou until 1 August 2026. For further information please contact [email protected].
Artwork:
David Bomberg (1890–1957)
Bomb Store, 1942
Oil on paper laid on canvas
41.9 x 58.4 cm
16 1/2 x 23 ins
From 1911 to 1913 David Bomberg was the pupil of Walter Sickert at the Slade School of Fine Art, funding himself through art school by working as a life model. Bomberg served in the trenches during World War I, and during the war both his brother and his close friend and fellow Slade student Isaac Rosenberg died. After 1918, and especially from 1920 onwards, he practised a rigorous Cubism, based on powerful angular forms and near to abstraction, although centred around figurative reference points. In 1929, after a trip to Spain, he abandoned his previous style, turning instead to a more informal whilst still dynamic Expressionism in which line is subordinate to stark, thickly built-up colour. Between 1946 and 1953 he was a lecturer at Borough Polytechnic, teaching such young painters as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.Produced in response to a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, David Bomberg’s Bomb Store (1942) belongs to one of the most significant series of British wartime paintings. Following a visit to the vast underground munitions depot at RAF Fauld in Staffordshire, Bomberg transformed the labyrinthine tunnels, stacked bombs, and military infrastructure of the site into a vehicle for abstraction. Characterised by dynamic linear brushwork and a compressed sense of space, the painting fuses architecture, machinery, and human activity into a densely structured composition. Often compared to the cavernous architectural spaces of Piranesi’s Carceri etchings, the Bomb Store paintings are widely regarded as among Bomberg’s greatest achievements and a landmark contribution to British art.
