This exhibition of drawings and paintings by British artist Roger Hilton (1911-75) brings colour, light and a return of the figure to Tate St Ives. Hilton painted his first abstract work in 1950 and by 1952 he was constructing bold designs of irregular shapes in strong colours where affinities lay with art informel and his friend, the Dutch artist Constant. The influence of Piet Mondrian's work is also evident by the mid 1950s in the colour schemes of white, black and red that he briefly adopted in paintings such as February–March 1954. However, his association with the St Ives artists – consolidated by his frequent visits to that town from the late 1950s – no doubt underpinned the landscape associations in his work at that time.

Inspired by contemporary European post-war abstract trends, Hilton's figurative paintings became more concerned with the act of painting and increasingly abstract. Aligned initially with constructivists in Lawrence Alloway's show of 1954 Nine Abstract Artists, his use of rich colour and texture evoking the rhythms of natural phenomena led to an affinity and association with the modernists working in St Ives from the mid 1950s. By the end of the decade Hilton returned to 'reinvent figuration', demonstrating not only his frustration with the limitations of abstract painting and rejection of American Abstract Expressionism in favour of the European tradition, but also his discovery that images could be generated from the process of painting itself. Hilton's colourful dynamic images of women successfully bridged the gap between abstraction and figuration and also between images of the figure and the landscape.

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Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Contemporary

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

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • 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.