Geoffrey Lefever – Journeys Exhibition – Stew Gallery, Norwich

Marsham-based artist Geoffrey Lefever, a long-term member of the Norwich 20 Group, is staging a one-man show, Journeys, featuring his work from the last decade at The Stew Gallery, Fishergate, Norwich. The show runs from Thursday, June 3 to Tuesday, June 15, 10am to 6pm daily, free admission.

A visit to Nepal in 2002 energised Geoffrey’s abstract painting practice and much of the work in the show is influenced by this visit.

Geoffrey Lefever explains: “My exposure to Himalayan culture had a very significant effect on me and resulted in an enriched output of work. My experience was outside anything that I had previously known. My paintings were much influenced by ‘marni’ imagery, Tibetan script seen in rock carvings and stone tablets throughout the Khumbu valleys.”

But the show also features works completed in a small hamlet in France, influenced by the heat and silence and by contrast in Norfolk informed by… “the sounds, smells and winds off the sea.”


A civil engineer, Geoffrey Lefever has combined a long career, dating back to the 1950s, with his development as a painter and a photographer. He has lived in Norfolk since 1963 and became a member of the Norwich 20 Group in 1965. Geoffrey studied painting at Norwich School of Art in the early 1980s and completed an MA in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University in 2004. His spell at Nottingham Trent coincided with his daughter Jane studying for a BA in Fine Art.

Geoffrey is also an experienced glider pilot and the special view of the world gained from the glider cockpit is another influence on his art.

His friend Derek Morris, a fellow member of the Norwich 20 Group and a past President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors says: “These serious and mysterious paintings demand a great deal of looking, but this effort will be repaid handsomely by meaning and understanding leaching slowly into one’s consciousness. This is a kind of painting one can return to over and over again and still find rewards every time.”

Geoffrey Lefever will also be exhibiting at Norfolk Contemporary Art 2010 at The Forum, Norwich from June 30 to July 21.

For more information about Geoffrey Lefever see www.geoffreylefever.com, tel. 01263 735051.
For more information about The Stew Gallery see www.stew.org.uk.