A Victoria and Albert Museum Loan Exhibition.

This is one of a series of loan exhibitions arranged by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Circulation Department, and consisting of recent, medium-scale works by perhaps four or five contemporary artists.

Each of the four present artists makes relief constructions but they do, also have other mutual affinities.

John Ernest and Anthony Hill have in the past worked in a more closely parallel manner than is to be seen in their current directions – both reaching the constructivist point of view in the mid-1950s, and continuing their later development without again altering this fundamental position.

Gillian Wise, interested in industrial materials and industrial methods of assembly, is a younger member of the English constructivist movement, already possessing an assured and mature style of her own. All three produce work which is pictorial, certainly in terms of form, yet which possesses a distinct nature equidistant from painting as it is from sculpture.

Malcolm Hughes, on the other hand, remains primarily a painter, who, from experimenting with areas of onlaid metal and becoming preoccupied with sequential changes of level, has begun relatively recently to use the relief format.

All four, however, are interested in, and indeed rely upon mathematical ideas,, both for their own sake and for their analogy as a language.

Four Artists Reliefs, Constructions and Drawings. Victoria and Albert Museum 1968.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Metal

    Metal is a medium frequently used by artists to make art works - from sculpture to printmaking. Surfaces can display an array of colours and textures, and are capable of being polished to a high gloss; metal can be melted, cast, or fused, hammered into thin sheets, or drawn into wire.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.