Construction 1955–1965

Richard Lin Show Yu, Painting Relief  1964

Anthony Hill, Relief Construction  1960–2

Hill was among the youngest of a group who, in the early 1950s, had revived an idealist abstract art. This is one of a series of reliefs in which the elements were planned using a precise mathematical formula and a module as the basic determining unit of proportion. New mass-produced materials, such as plastic and aluminium angle sections, create a sense of illusionist space through precision of design. Hill commented: ‘Synthetic materials and other materials like glass and metal in their machine states gives the abstract artist a new and important group of media and it is with these materials that “Constructionist” conceptions can be realized and developed.

Gallery label, September 2016

Gillian Wise, Brown, Black and White Relief with Prisms  1962

Mary Martin, Spiral  1963

Mary Martin showed a number of related relief constructions in an exhibition in early 1964. The common unit to all of them was a right-angled wedge. Made from a cube of wood cut diagonally in half, the wood surfaces were covered in a thin sheet of stainless steel. They are grouped together against a background of black formica. The wedges are juxtaposed in all possible ways so as to reflect the light from different angles. The complexity of the reflections and light patterns becomes clear only as the spectator moves his or her position, or the angle of light changes.

Gallery label, August 2004

Victor Pasmore, Synthetic Construction (White and Black)  1965–6

Kenneth Martin, Linkage  1955

Martin began to make mobiles in the early 1950s. This one was described by him as 'an experiment with a linkage which hung and balanced from two points with a central point that could describe a variety of horizontal curves'. It was inspired by A.B. Kempe's lecture on linkages (1877), which Martin discovered while researching at the Science Museum. It overcomes the problem of pivoting rigid components together without stable suspension points.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Fountain  1951–2

Kenneth Martin, Mobile Reflector  1955

Martin adopted abstraction in the late 1940s, constructing his first mobiles in 1951. He was part of a small group reviving pre-war ideas of a non-representational art. This is one of the first in his series of Mobile Reflectors, in which geometrical plates were suspended and balanced from rods. The slightest current of air causes movement so the mobiles are ever changing. Martin referred to his mobiles as ‘drawings in space’ using repeated shapes and complimentary colour combinations, and stated that the resulting shadows were as important as the work itself.

Gallery label, September 2016

Li Yuan-chia, B N=0  1965

Vera Spencer, Artist versus Machine  c.1954

Artist versus Machine is a landscape-format work made around 1954. The background is made of orange, red and green coloured paper, on which the artist overlaid two rows of twenty punched cards, painted with gouache in violet, red, black and browns. The grid formed by the punched cards, stitched together in two chains, is not entirely regular as the cards are not perfectly aligned, some sitting slightly higher or lower than the others over the two rows. Irregular quadrilateral pieces of yellow, pink, black, brown, violet and purple paper are applied irregularly over some of the cards. One card in the top row and two adjacent ones in the bottom row are nearly completely covered with paper cut-outs. The top of the first card on the left of the top row is overlaid with an irregularly cut strip of paper featuring the artist’s name in capital, typeset and printed white letters on a black background. The punched cards used in the work are of the type first demonstrated by the French weaver and merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard in the early nineteenth century, and used in the mechanical looms for weaving cloth that he conceived, in which a chain of punched cards laced together allowed the loom to create complex patterns.

Denis Williams, Painting in Six Related Rhythms  1955

In this painting, Williams trades organic forms for geometric planes. The diamond shape of the canvas recalls the early twentieth century Dutch De Stijl school of geometric abstraction. But the dense layering of planes evokes the filtering of light and shadow through a rainforest canopy. Williams’s daughter Evelyn Williams has suggested the rhythms of the title may reference the formal complexity and spiritual significance of African drumming, and the African foundations of Caribbean identity.

Gallery label, January 2022

Ann Sutton OBE, Spiral Colour and Area Progression  1965

Spiral Colour and Area Progression 1965 is a wall-hung work that comprises a piece of textile woven from cow hair and mounted onto a square piece of wood. For this work, Sutton wanted a structure that would give solid blocks of different colour in adjacent areas. This was not possible on a conventional loom, so Sutton created a structure using nails pinned onto a board to weave this piece. Using eight colours of commercially dyed cow hair, and starting with a single square unit at the centre, she created a spiral by increasing the number of units by one with each colour change. She completed the increments upon reaching the point where she had added six units, when the spiral became a square with all four sides of equal length (having discovered that next number of units to achieve this would be thirty-two by thirty-two).

Ann Sutton OBE, Diminishing Square Thickness  1965

Diminishing Square Thickness 1965 is a wall-hung work made using cotton fibre on plywood. Three thicknesses of light-coloured cotton yarn have been used to make a grid of woven square sections against a square red ground. Woven not on a loom but using nails on a board, the method allows the artist to isolate each thickness of thread in adjacent sections. With the thickest and coarsest yarn used around the outer edges of the grid, becoming increasingly more delicate towards the central square, the composition acquires a sense of recession and visual weightlessness towards the centre of the grid.