Modern Forms

Winifred Nicholson, Sandpipers, Alnmouth  1933

Throughout her life, most of Nicholson’s work depicted either flowers or landscape. This painting was made during a holiday on the Northumberland coast. It is typical in its reduction of the scene to a few simple areas of colour. Despite this abstraction it is still very evocative, not least because of her application of real sand to the paint denoting the beach. Nicholson’s paintings have an air of freshness and of the back-to-basics attitude upon which she based her lifestyle.

Gallery label, September 2016

Bob Law, Is a Mind a Prison  1970

Law’s concrete poem, the first line of which serves as the work’s title, has been inscribed into a squat obelisk made of salvaged lead roofing sheet from his work as a builder’s joiner. Law has used individual sans serif letter stamps, resulting in both a printed and hand-made finish, and for display the work is dusted with flour to highlight the script. A preoccupation with the physical and material dimensions of perception is key to Law’s work, which intersects minimalism, conceptual art and abstract painting informed by landscape, Zen Buddhism and carpentry.

Gallery label, September 2016

Sandra Blow, Vivace  1988

Stephen Partridge, Monitor  1974

Monitor is one of the early defining works of video art in Britain, revealing the structural possibilities the medium offered to artists. For Partridge it is a pure exploration of its working process. A 1973 Sony monitor is recorded close up by a camera, the hardware becoming the subject of the video. Thecamera, linked to the monitor it is filming, creates in the monitor an infinite succession of repeated images of itself. The artist’s hands are seen to turn the monitor to the right through 90 degrees, challenging the physical restrictions of the monitor by becoming physically involved with repositioning it.

Gallery label, September 2016

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Chessmen One  1961

The painting Chessmen One depicts four horizontal rows of black chess pieces which increase in height from the top down. They are set against a lightly textured pale blue background. Each row of chessmen is decorated with sinuous linear detail in different colours, red on the top row, blue on the second, cream on the third and green on the fourth. Each horizontal division between the rows is painted in one of these colours. The chessmen are depicted in a schematic, near abstract frontal view that emphasises the flatness and two-dimensional surface of the canvas.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Rock Theme, St Just  1953

Rock Theme, St Just 1953 is an oil painting in a landscape format that combines a representational landscape setting (St Just in West Penwith, Cornwall) with an abstract configuration of planes and colours that appears to describe a large structure made of stone. This structure dominates the composition; only a narrow upper portion of the canvas sets the scene within the landscape of the coast in West Cornwall. The horizon line is very high, both the sky and sea are painted in lighter and darker shades of a chalky grey respectively, and a thin strip of headland (green fields with a stony cliff surface) delineates the shape of the land. If the foreground of the work describes St Just, the distance might denote Cape Cornwall, a prominent, low headland situated to the north-west.

Sir Terry Frost, circle of British Council (London, UK), Black, White and Yellow 1974  1974

Trevor Bell, Calshot  1970

Calshot 1970 is a large painting in acrylic paint on two shaped canvases which together make a triangular form. Bell developed a painting practice that combined the formalist rigour of much abstract painting of the 1960s with references to external sources: landscape and nature, as well as personal experiences. Building on paintings inspired by, and evocative of, the Cornish coast and the Yorkshire Dales (see, for example, Forces 1962, Tate T13393), in the mid- and late 1960s he began to use shaped canvases and to make paintings that consisted of more than a single support.

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Maquette, Three Forms in Echelon  1961

Anthony Hill, Orthogonal / Diagonal Composition  1954

This painting is the first of Hill's purely linear works. It can be 'read' in a number of ways. It is deliberately organized so that the junctions of the lines optically destabilize the composition, which can be broken up into lines, points, squares and triangles. Influences included earlier European abstraction, as well as Duchamp (Hill describes the work as a 'geometric readymade'). Most of Hill's subsequent abstract work has been in sculpture and relief.

Gallery label, August 2004

Roger Hilton, Untitled  1953

Although abstract, Hilton's work during the early 1950s has an impressionistic quality inspired by Bonnard's garden paintings. In 1953 Hilton's painting changed dramatically. Following a visit to Amsterdam and the Hague, where he was able to study Mondrian's painting, his ideas regarding space, form and colour were revolutionised. He ceased to regard the painting surface as if it was a window. Instead the forms are built up on it, emphasising its flatness. He also greatly simplified his use of shape and colour, restricting himself, as in this painting, to lines and squares in primary colours and black and white. These 'neo-plastic' works eliminate illusion and emphasise the physical, object-like quality of the painting.

Gallery label, August 2004

Carel Visser, Fish Spine  1954

Victor Pasmore, Abstract in White, Black, Indian and Lilac  1957

Pasmore believed that art derived from nature, and specifically from its underlying processes and structures rather than its surface appearance. In his reliefs Pasmore brought ideas of growth and abstract harmony into three dimensions. He rejected tilted elements because they were not organic developments of the rectangles in the way that horizontals and verticals are. He added: Geometry, though subject to the quoi of personal judgment, is a guide to the organic process.

Gallery label, August 2004

Kenneth Martin, Screw Mobile with Black Centre  c.1958–65

This mobile consists of two circular elements composed of bronze rods. They radiate from a black wooden 'hub' at the centre, in the shape of a cylindroid, and are joined at the outer rim. One of the elements is horizontal and oscillates from the centre. The second element rotates around the centre, and, through the twist, makes an endless surface. The strip of metal along the outside edge also makes an endless surface. Originally the mobile was rotated with an electric motor. Kenneth Martin wrote that the mobile was 'an essay in repetitive rhythm. It is like a landscape which rotates around its centre of perspective - though this simile must not be taken too far'.

Gallery label, September 2004

Brian Wall, Untitled  1959

Brian Wall’s Untitled c.1958 is a sculpture made up of black painted steel bars – four of these describe the line of a wave form held together by two additional bars, welded together to provide stability. Brian Wall was the only one of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s (1903–1975) assistants to have developed a style of sculpture distinctly his own (he worked as Hepworth’s part-time studio assistant between 1956 and 1960). Wall’s earlier works – made between 1955 and 1957 – were constructions indebted to the neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), whose work he had been introduced to both by Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and the critic David Lewis. In 1957 he began to make sculpture of welded steel, inspired by the ideas of Naum Gabo (1890–1977) and the practice of Julio Gonzalez (1890–1977) more than by Hepworth herself. The earliest of these welded sculptures were rectilinear arrangements of steel rods (sometimes embellished by small sheets of steel as planes of colour).