Glyn Uzzell

Glyn Uzzell (1930–2014), painter and printmaker, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, England, in 1930. His formal studies were at the London Institute of Education and at Goldsmith’s College in London between 1949 and 1951. Uzzell moved to Geneva in 1957 where he taught at the International School of Geneva and, in 1964, he co-founded the Galerie Contemporaine in Carouge, Geneva, to promote the work of young artists. In 1965, he went to New York where he studied printmaking at the Art Students’ League, and the following year he worked at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental Atelier 17 in Paris where he learned the technique of printing in simultaneous colors. This process is, according to Charles Goerg, “based on the difference in depth of the plances eaten into the plate by the acid, on the viscosity of various inks, and the relative hardness of the rollers.” He was asked in 1967 to establish and supervise the state subsidized printmaking workshop, Centre de Gravure Contemporaine de Geneve. Uzzell moved to Caramujeira, Portugal, in 1979 where he set up his studio and print workshop.
Of his art, he explained: “My work is greatly influenced by the environment. Subjects are alluded to but not with straightforward representation. Time, place and mood play their part in images that are ostensibly abstract but reveal a point of contact with the visual world.” Georg sees a relationship between all of Uzzell’s engravings. “Rather than appearing as events in themselves, they succeed each other as moments in the scanning of an interior world..., one without reference to to time, the rhapsodic expression of surface texture....”
He exhibited widely, particularly in Switzerland, Germany, and Portugal, where he had been associated with the Centro Cultural Sao Lourenco for more than twenty years. He has had 16 major solo and 28 group shows between 1957 and 1972, including a large solo show of his collected etchings in Geneva’s Musée d’Art at d’Histoire in 1972. Uzzell’s work is included in the  Cabinet des Estampes permanent collection of that museum, also in those of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Eidenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, and many others.
Glyn Uzzell and his longtime partner Paul Fonck died when the gas line to their house in Lagoa, Portugal, exploded, destroying everything on June 23, 2014.