Ken Horton: A Life In Colour Exhibition Coming To The Cornerstone Gallery
Rhythm, light and colour – Ken Horton steps back into the spotlight…
Ken Horton’s upcoming exhibition at The Cornerstone Gallery, A Life in Colour, offers Liverpool audiences the chance to step inside the creative world of one of the city’s most quietly influential artists. Running from 6 November to 18 December 2025, this retrospective gathers together paintings spanning more than forty years – from figurative beginnings to luminous geometric abstractions that pulse with life and colour.
Born in Huyton in 1940, Horton’s artistic journey has been deeply rooted in Liverpool. His father, a keen landscape painter, introduced him to art at an early age. “There was always a sense that making art was normal,” Horton recalls. “It wasn’t something mysterious – it was just part of what you did.” At Prescot Grammar School, his creative interests flourished under the guidance of art teacher William Walters, and it was there that he formed a lasting friendship with fellow student Stuart Sutcliffe, who would later become both a celebrated painter and one of the original Beatles.
After leaving school at sixteen to work as a trainee technician at Liverpool University Medical School, Horton was encouraged by Sutcliffe to apply to the Liverpool College of Art on Hope Street. He was accepted, and under the tutelage of Arthur Ballard – a key figure in the city’s art scene and mentor to John Lennon – Horton developed the technical and compositional discipline that would underpin his later work. “Ballard had this incredible ability to open your eyes to the structure of a painting – not just what it showed, but how it worked,” Horton reflects. Those early lessons in structure and balance would eventually inform his mature geometric compositions.
Following graduation, Horton trained as a teacher and began a forty-year career in Liverpool’s secondary schools, teaching ceramics and art while continuing to produce his own work. Tony Smith, Curator and Manager at The Cornerstone Gallery, believes this dual commitment – to art and to education – has shaped Horton’s legacy. “Ken represents a generation of Liverpool artists who sustained the city’s creative life through teaching,” Smith explains. “He wasn’t chasing fame. He was nurturing talent while quietly refining his own vision.”
Through the 1970s and ’80s, Horton exhibited regularly at key Liverpool venues such as St George’s Hall, The Neptune Theatre, and in June Furlong’s celebrated “Merseyside Artists” series at the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo Building, Senate House, and The Mersey Docks and Harbour Building. His earlier works were figurative, often infused with surrealist and photo-realist tendencies – but by the 1980s his focus began to shift dramatically. “I became fascinated by colour itself,” Horton says. “I realised that colour could be the subject – not just a tool.”
This realisation led Horton toward abstraction, particularly the lyrical, colour-driven approach of the Orphist painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay. His paintings from this period onward reveal a fascination with the play of light, rhythm and geometry. Using only straight lines and circles, Horton builds compositions of remarkable vitality and depth, where colour relationships seem to hum with musical energy. “Ken’s paintings have this geometric lyricism,” Smith observes. “They’re precise, but never cold. You feel a human warmth in the balance of shapes and the way the colours breathe.”
Despite their structural clarity, Horton’s abstractions are far from mathematical exercises. The artist insists that his process is intuitive rather than planned. “I don’t map out the finished work,” he explains. “I let it emerge, one decision leading to another. The painting discovers itself.” That openness to discovery, coupled with his lifelong interest in nature and bird photography, brings an organic rhythm to even his most rigorous compositions. “You can feel the pulse of the natural world in Ken’s work,” says Smith. “Even when he’s painting pure geometry, there’s this sense of life – as if the colours themselves are alive.”
A Life in Colour gathers together works from across Horton’s long and dedicated career, including paintings that haven’t been seen in decades and new pieces completed in recent months. For the artist, it’s both a reflection on time and a celebration of continuity. “Some of these works take me right back to when I was first experimenting with abstraction,” Horton says. “Others are brand new. Seeing them together feels like reconnecting different parts of myself.”
Smith believes the exhibition will resonate deeply with those who know Liverpool’s art history. “Ken Horton has been part of the city’s creative DNA for over half a century,” he says. “He embodies a quiet commitment to the idea that making art is a lifelong practice – not a career move, but a way of being in the world.”
For visitors, Ken Horton: A Life in Colour promises an exhibition of warmth, energy and optimism. It’s a reminder that the act of painting – whether rooted in memory, colour or pure form – remains an endlessly renewing conversation between artist and viewer. Horton’s art may have evolved from figurative to abstract, but the impulse behind it has never changed: a fascination with the world’s structure, rhythm and beauty.
Ken Horton: A Life in Colour runs from Thursday 6 November to Thursday 18 December 2025 at The Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University Creative Campus.
