Born 1943, Derby, England.

Eric Gadsby studied at Derby and District College of Art from 1961-65 before going to London as a postgraduate student at Hornsey College of Art.

Gadsby was among a group of artists who emerged in the 1960s when there was a sudden burgeoning of artistic talent in Britain, largely inspired by the recent dramatic arrival of the American Abstract Expressionists. Two of his paintings, Rise and Fall and Tab, were shown in the 'The New Generation' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1966. The latter work was bought by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, sponsors of the exhibition.

Commenting on Rise and Fall, the curator of the exhibition wrote: “The colours blend into one another without visible transitions; the paint surface is thin, impersonal, meticulously worked over ... The result is that you read these paintings, not as solid forms, but as metaphors of light energy. They generate a strong illusion of warped space and the speed with which one's eye travels over the canvas, around the coils of the spectrum band, encountering different resistances from different colours, is important to the illusion' (Bryan Robertson, Exhibition catalogue, 'The New Generation', Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1966, p. 70).

Two years later the 'New Generation' show, given the subtitle interim, included work by Gadsby; this was probably Odeon, dated 1968, which was sold by Christies in London in November 2014.

Flobe