Following a successful exhibition in 2012, local artist and prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist Morris Nitsun is launching his new collection of paintings on 20th September at Highgate Contemporary Art on Highgate High Street.

Morris Nitsun continues to reveal his versatility as an artist, his natural skills of observation and sensitivity to a wide range of subjects. His themes vary from well-loved landscapes and seascapes, reflecting travels in places such as the Devon coastline, rural Italy, the deserts of South Africa, and the savannahs of the Masai Mara. Different as these places are, the paintings are united in their compositional strength, moments of surprise and the artist’s acute sense of place.

The house features in many of these paintings, usually a simple, elemental dwelling in a vast landscape; similarly the boat, solitary, moored in a shimmering bay or out to sea in its huge expanse: both these can be interpreted as symbols of humanity complementing the splendours of nature.

The exhibition includes new flower paintings, ablaze with colour and sensual delight, often reflecting the influence of Nicolas de Stael, whose work the artist greatly admires. Figurative studies, generally of the male, are a further development. All Morris Nitsun’s paintings have in common a vivid palette and the thick, delicious textures of oil paint. Two further aspects unite the work - a keen sense of the real, of the present and the immediate, coexisting with a sense of the spiritual hidden in the simplest object. All his paintings celebrate the essence of the subject, be it a landscape, a house, a figure or a flower. Each has a presence that transcends mere paint, taking the viewer into a relationship with that subject.

2015 has been an important year for Morris Nitsun, with the publication of Beyond the Anti-group: Survival and Transformation adding to his international reputation in the field of psychotherapy and group analysis. This new exhibition of paintings similarly affirms his development and success as an artist.