Adrian Heath

London, London Group, February 1951.

Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, p.102, illustrated p.101.

The canvas is in good overall condition. There are two tiny spots of paint loss in the upper right quadrant. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals areas of fluorescence which appear to be the reworking of the artist. Held in a wooden rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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As with his contemporaries Victor Pasmore, Kenneth & Mary Martin and Terry Frost, Heath's path to abstraction was one which initially began by breaking up a figurative image. He had initially been influenced by the ideas of Jacques Villon, and there exist a very small number of paintings which show recognisable subject matter broken up by geometric devices. However, Heath began to find that

'...a starting point in nature was meaningless. My interest turned to the development of shape and colour and I decided to change my methods, starting to build up paintings from a series of simple shapes derived from an analysis of the picture's format. In this I was influenced by the ideas of Gris whose work of 1912-14 I particularly admired...' (The artist, unpublished typed statement, circa 1962, quoted in Greive, op.cit., p.101)

Using geometric subdivisions of the basic format of the support, Heath used basic forms to create his earliest pure abstracts, and the first of these, Rotating Rectangles (Artist's estate) was exhibited in a London Group exhibition in December of 1949. The present work demonstrates how quickly Heath developed this approach to his painting, and must be one of the very earliest fully resolved abstract canvases he produced. Taking as its basis the principles found in the writings of Jay Hambidge through which units that are related to the subdivisions of the proportions of the canvas are rotated and pivoted until the artist achieved a composition he found harmonious. The palette of the present work is relatively muted in tone and indeed the colours strike an interesting parallel with Frost and Pasmore's abstract paintings of the same date.