Roger Hilton was one of the most original and most uncompromising abstract painters working in Europe or America during the 1950s. In the 1960s, however, figures and landscapes began to appear in his paintings. Such a departure seemed heretical to other artists working with abstraction. This new direction has been associated with his increasing association with Cornwall. He regularly visited from 1956 and moved to Botallack Moor in 1965. In fact, throughout his mature career he had been concerned with the way forward for modern painting and with the tension between abstraction and figuration.

The exhibition begins with works of the 1960s and 1970s, when Hilton felt able to shift between totally abstract compositions and the figurative. Subsequent rooms show the gradual development of Hilton's work, through groups from certain periods. One might see revealed the persistence of certain key characteristics such as his sophisticated handling of paint, the importance of the drawn line, an edgy erotic charge in even the most abstract works and, surprisingly, the constant presence in his work of the human figure, as in The Aral Sea 1958, his largest work.