Fred Ingrams

British landscape artist Fred Ingrams is fascinated by the Fenlands, the flat and forgotten coastal plains in the East of England depicted in his landscape paintings. Often opting for plein air painting rather than in the studio, Fred Ingrams juxtaposes fine details with stark, empty horizon lines to capture the aesthetically uncompromising terrain. At a young age, he broke away from the traditional imperative to work in oil and continues to use acrylic to represent the interplay between the overarching strict order and bursts of chaos contained within his chosen terrain.

EDUCATION AND EARLY EXHIBITIONS

Paradoxically, Fred Ingrams has attended two of London’s top art colleges and has been largely self-taught. After attending Camberwell in the early 1980s, the Fenlands' artist was expelled from his MFA at St. Martin's Schools of Art. This apparent blow turned out to be a positive step. He took residency in a room above Soho’s iconic Coach & Horses pub, where he spent the next 10 years honing his own style of painting. Here, he explored his marshland art, depicting East England landscapes.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, his acrylic landscape paintings were exhibited in solo exhibitions at iconic London venues, including The Groucho Club, Albemarle Gallery and Bruton Street Gallery. Here, Fred Ingrams’s art has been acquired from a range of local collectors and tastemakers, including Francis Bacon.

FRED INGRAMS’ RECENT CAREER

Although the artist now lives immersed in nature between the Fens and the Flow Country—another remarkably flat landscape which is becoming a new preoccupation of his— Fred Ingrams continues to leave a mark on modern British art. Since 2015, he has exhibited with Art Bermondsey and One Paved Court. His work Ditch on Mildenhall Fen was also shown at the House of Vans as part of the 2018 Rise Art Prize exhibition.

You can read more about Fred Ingram’s contemporary landscape art in our article profiling Fred Ingrams.