Celebrating 50 years as a sculptor and artist, Bruce McLean is perhaps, these days, also unusual in that he has had a relationship with the Bernard Jacobson gallery since his first one-man exhibition there in 1984.  The gallery is celebrating his long career with a programme of exhibitions and events, with McLean’s playful, theatrical and colourful works contrasting with the white walls, exposed brick and steel structure of the gallery with its huge lightwell wall rising up into the sky.  As is often the case with the gallery, there is also a touch of playfulness in the positioning of paintings opposite the refined architecture of Fortnum and Mason.

The programme also includes a new film, ‘The Decorative Potential of Blazing Factories’, a collaboration with the film director/producer Gary Chitty which has been 30 years in the making and has been specially commissioned by the newly refurbished Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, which sounds to be challenging critique of art and politics:  ‘Set against a background of pollution, flooding and a 750 tonne concrete fireplace, this is a story of an artist’s quest to create the greatest landscape painting of all time (at any cost) and a politician’s ambition for a North/South fireside summit’.