Construction 1955–1965

Adrian Heath, White Collage  1954

Adrian Heath uses painting and collage to create curved forms, contrasting painted regions with the ‘ready-made’ surfaces of paper and card. The use of found materials was common among a group of artists known as constructivists, who held exhibitions in Heath’s London home. Their compositions were often inspired by processes of growth in plants and animals and theories of proportion. Heath wrote: ‘The thing of interest is the actual life of the work: its growth from a particular white canvas or board … It is the process, the method of development that is the life of the painting.’

Gallery label, January 2025

Kenneth Martin, Mobile Reflector  1955

Kenneth Martin started making mobiles in 1951. He called them ‘drawings in space’. The slightest current of air causes movement, so the mobiles are always changing. To him, the resulting shadows were as important as the work itself. This is one of the first in his series of Mobile Reflectors, in which geometrical plates are suspended and balanced from rods. Martin was part of a small group of artists who returned to ideas about non-representational art that had been developing before the Second World War.

Gallery label, September 2023

Kenneth Martin, Linkage  1955

Kenneth Martin made his mobiles to be viewed from below. Their lightweight structures respond to their surroundings, to temperature and air flow. He described this one 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.’ Martin became interested in the idea of linkages when he came across the work of mathematician Alfred Kempe (1849–1922) while researching at the Science Museum in London.

Gallery label, September 2023

Li Yuan-chia, B N=0  1965

Li Yuan-chia made this work the year he moved to London from Bologna, Italy. In the 1950s, he was part of the Taiwanese Ton Fan group, which helped establish abstract art in Taiwan and China. The calligraphic mark inspired his early work. Here it is reduced to two white dots contained within a geometric wooden construction. The dot symbolises a ‘Cosmic Point’, which Li described as ‘the beginning of everything and also the end. If you can really understand it, you will feel indeed the great life of the universe and the value of your existence.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Denis Williams, Painting in Six Related Rhythms  1955

This painting was inspired by organic growth, mathematics and geometric abstraction. Denis Williams structured it on a grid of one-inch squares that he then segmented to create a lattice. The result resembles an irregular crystal or a complex architectural space. This was a brief exploration into geometric abstraction for the artist. Williams’s daughter Evelyn A Williams has observed that ‘it is interesting to consider to what extent non-European “survival rhythms” are embedded in the subconscious personal iconography of Williams’ abstract work.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Ann Sutton OBE, Diminishing Square Thickness  1965

Ann Sutton has experimented with the possibilities of weaving since the late 1950s. Woven using nails on a board, Diminishing Square Thickness is made with three weights of cotton yarn. The yarn is thickest and coarsest around the outer edges of the grid, becoming lighter towards the central square. This gives the composition a sense of receding space. Sutton worked in dialogue with artists associated with constructivism, such as Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin.

Gallery label, September 2023

Richard Lin Show Yu, Painting Relief  1964

William Scott, Orange, Black and White Composition  1953

William Scott’s abstract works are drawn from still life, figures and landscapes. He admitted: ‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space ... disconcerting contours, the things of life.’ In the 1950s, Scott exhibited with artists who were interested in stylised abstract forms, such as those in this room. Like them, Scott used geometrical shapes, but his work was distinctive for his interest in intuition, and his practice of starting from observations of real objects and people.

Gallery label, January 2025

Victor Pasmore, Yellow Abstract  1960–1

Despite its title, Yellow Abstract is dominated by an expanse of ochre paint. Victor Pasmore explained, ‘Ochre can be a tint of yellow. But yellow is more poetic than ochre’. He creates a sense of pressure by placing black lines above and below the ochre form, as if it is being squashed. This work belongs to a group of similar paintings Pasmore made between 1959 and 1963. He was returning to themes of movement and growth that first appeared in his work of the 1940s when he moved from figuration to abstraction.

Gallery label, January 2025

Anthony Hill, Relief Construction  1960–2

Anthony Hill began making wall-mounted sculptures, or reliefs, in the 1950s. Newly mass-produced materials such as aluminium and plastic offered fresh possibilities. He said: ‘With these new materials come a new “art object” – the construction.’ Hill championed constructionism – geometric art constructed using new and industrial materials, with a focus on pattern and proportion. He used a mathematical formula to determine the proportion of each element in this work.

Gallery label, September 2023

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

The prisms in this work are from submarine periscopes. Gillian Wise also incorporated sheets of different types of industrial plastics. She said: ‘Reflections, and the complexity they can create... often suggest to me a curiously poetic sensation.’ For Wise, this complexity had to be ‘well controlled within a formal concept’. She stated that she was working in a ‘tradition of construction that has developed in England over the years since the 1930s.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Mary Martin, Spiral  1963

Mary Martin made this wall-based sculpture with cubes of wood cut in half diagonally. She then fixed each half cube with a reflective stainless-steel plate. The reflecting surfaces face all directions, so where you stand changes your experience of the work. It reflects itself and its environment. Martin explained: ‘The reflected structures, or hidden structures, are made within the same system as the real structure. Illusion and reality are added to shadow and substance.’ She went on to apply this approach to larger public commissions.

Gallery label, September 2023

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Fountain  1951–2

Eduardo Paolozzi made this sculpture while developing ideas for a large-scale working fountain. This was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain, on London’s Southbank. He went on to make the 4.5-metre structure on a low budget, using steel scaffolding pipes and concrete. During the early 1950s, Paolozzi worked on several other architectural projects. He decorated the bar of the new Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In 1953, he was commissioned to make three more fountains in a public setting in Hamburg, Germany.

Gallery label, September 2023