ACCORDING To McGee are exhibiting the work of the late Dave Pearson for a second time.

He died in 2008, leaving behind a legacy of £1 million worth of paintings and sketches, and Greg and Ails McGee have liaised again with the Dave Pearson Trust for the latest retrospective show at their gallery in Tower Street, York, entitled Transitions.

"His 2014 exhibition pretty much kick-started our tenth anniversary celebrations last year," says Greg. "It can be heavy stuff, and though his work is avidly collected worldwide, we weren't sure how well it would connect with our northern cohort of collectors. We needn't have worried. Critically, these paintings can 'duke for duke' with any other paintings from the last century. Commercially, they did very well indeed too.

"Working with the Dave Pearson Trust was effortless. Singing from the same hymn sheet is rarer than you'd think in the creative industries, and so here we are, one year later, with a show that is as much of a coup for York as it is for us a contemporary gallery."

Greg and Ails have enjoyed working once more with the trust. "They take the lion's share of responsibility and have an eye for details as rigorous and exacting as any outfit we've ever worked with," says Ails Trust spokesman Bob Frith is delighted the McGees are mounting this second Dave Pearson show.

“It's good to see Dave's work back in York," he says. "At stages throughout his career, he arrived at a place where he was able to work with vigour and confidence on typically large, wildly impressive and ambitious series of thematic works.

"In the 1960s, it was an obsession with Vincent Van Gogh; in the 1970s, it was English Calendar Customs; from 1989 through to the late 1990s, the epic series based on Yeats's poetry, Sailing To Byzantium and ‘Byzantium. After that there were series inspired by Bestiaries, and his illness, as well as a number of other themes.

“These deeply impressive periods of work may appear to have arrived fully formed, as if out of nowhere, but in fact Dave also went through long periods where his work struggles and wrestles with ideas and textures, colours and concepts, that may eventually metamorphose into the clarity of the next series of work.

"Sometimes these explorations appear to reach a dead-end, a journey that runs its course and then simply fades away. For anyone really interested in Dave Pearson’s work, these periods of transition are fascinating and deserve study, for they can be truly revelatory.”

Ails considers Pearson's paintings to be serious, expertly crafted and "more energetic and witty than the work of all the critical darlings from 20 years ago."

She also draw attention to the narrative quality of the exhibition, "There's a story running throughout the show that these works are a snapshot of what was happening in Pearson's mind and how excited he was by the possibilities of paint, just before he launched himself into his epic vision of what became the Byzantium series," she says.

"It's called 'Transitions' because you have the sense of a master painter on the cusp of something. You can really feel him giving up on old techniques and motifs and readying himself for his career-defining moment.

"A lot of our collectors remember seeing Byzantium on the BBC's One Show, with art critic Edward Lucie Smith saying how it'll soon be worth a quarter of a million. Well, now you can see the blueprint of those pieces, the preliminary paintings, and they're all available to buy."

Dave Pearson: Transitions runs at According To McGee, Tower Street, York, until April 12.