Victor Pasmore: From Constructions to Spray PaintNew Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury, 12th November-29th January 2012, Tel: 01980 862 244
The title says it all. This small exhibition of works by the 20th-century British abstract artist Victor Pasmore takes us from his early constructions in the 1950s and 1960s through to some colourful late spray paintings from the 1990s. It reminds us of how convincing a link he was able to forge through his career between the utopian geometric visions of the Constructivists and the more playful abstraction of artists such as Miró and Klee.
Pasmore (1908-1998) built his career as a young man as a largely self-taught, lyrical figurative painter, a friend of William Coldstream and founding member of the realist, anti-avant garde Euston Road School. In 1948, however, Pasmore made a radical switch to abstraction, a decision hailed by the august critic Herbert Read as “the most revolutionary event in post-war British art.” Pioneering the British revival of both abstraction and Constructivism, from 1951 Pasmore gave up painting altogether, building intriguing pictures instead, in shallow three dimensions, out of plywood and Perspex. This restless experimentation even led him into architecture, when he took on the role of consulting director to the newly-constructed town of Peterlee in County Durham.
It was not until the mid-1990s that Pasmore returned to painting, discovering, after his move to Malta, a new freedom through spray painting. This exhibition is the first survey show since Pasmore’s death, revealing both the rigorous analyst of space and, in the vivid late works, the sensual poet. Inhabiting both Roche Court’s modernist Artists’ House and the gallery, this is an ideal opportunity to re-evaluate an artist who has yet to be fully given his due.
The title says it all. This small exhibition of works by the 20th-century British abstract artist Victor Pasmore takes us from his early constructions in the 1950s and 1960s through to some colourful late spray paintings from the 1990s. It reminds us of how convincing a link he was able to forge through his career between the utopian geometric visions of the Constructivists and the more playful abstraction of artists such as Miró and Klee.
Pasmore (1908-1998) built his career as a young man as a largely self-taught, lyrical figurative painter, a friend of William Coldstream and founding member of the realist, anti-avant garde Euston Road School. In 1948, however, Pasmore made a radical switch to abstraction, a decision hailed by the august critic Herbert Read as “the most revolutionary event in post-war British art.” Pioneering the British revival of both abstraction and Constructivism, from 1951 Pasmore gave up painting altogether, building intriguing pictures instead, in shallow three dimensions, out of plywood and Perspex. This restless experimentation even led him into architecture, when he took on the role of consulting director to the newly-constructed town of Peterlee in County Durham.
It was not until the mid-1990s that Pasmore returned to painting, discovering, after his move to Malta, a new freedom through spray painting. This exhibition is the first survey show since Pasmore’s death, revealing both the rigorous analyst of space and, in the vivid late works, the sensual poet. Inhabiting both Roche Court’s modernist Artists’ House and the gallery, this is an ideal opportunity to re-evaluate an artist who has yet to be fully given his due.
