PAINTING As Celebration, a new exhibition by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her 91st year, takes place at York Art Gallery.

A key figure since the 1940s within the group of innovative artists associated with St Ives, she continues to produce paintings and prints of evident freshness and excitement. On show will be works exploring the nature of her art over the past ten to 15 years, along with a few career-spanning works as reference points to the recurring preoccupations and themes of her painting.

Gallery curator Richard Green says: "With a seemingly infinite capacity for invention, great precision of judgement and intense, boundless enthusiasm, it is amazing that a painter of such significance has been so little celebrated."

Barns-Graham describes her work as expressing energy, affirmation and joy in a celebration of life. The recent works in this exhibition follow a period of illness in the 1980s.

She is still drawing inspiration not only from the landscape and her love of the natural world but also the ample resource of her unconscious.

Her biographer, Lynne Green, puts it this way: "To look with the outer eye and to see with the inner eye is the mark of a natural painter. Barns-Graham is an artist who imagines in form and colour, whose first response to experience is to express its equivalent in the language of painting."

This touring exhibition finally recognises Barns-Graham as one of the senior figures of British art: still an actively inventive, consistently challenging artist.

Painting As Celebration runs until April 27. York Art Gallery, in Exhibition Square, is open daily from 10am to 5pm and admission is free.

Updated: 09:51 Friday, March 14, 2003