Robyn Denny

Acquired directly from the Artist by the present owner

Leverkusen, Stadtisches Museum, Neue Malerei in England, 15th September - 5th November 1961, cat. no.12;
Basel, Galerie Handschin, Denny/Greninger/Olsen, 1962 (details untraced);
Bristol, Arnolfini Gallery, Paintings by John Ernest, Robyn Denny, 1st - 26th October 1966 (details untraced);
Verona, Studio la Citta, Robyn Denny, 10th November - 5th December 1973, un-numbered exhibition.

Original canvas. The canvas appears sound. There is a very small pressure mark to the canvas in the lower left corner. There is some slight rubbing apparent to the corners and around the edges in places, with some slight possible losses. There is an old scratch towards the right side of the lower horizontal edge, and one towards the upper right corner of light blue pigment in the upper right quadrant. There is also a diagonal scuff in the lower right corner, and a slight scuff to the light blue and brown pigments in the lower half of the canvas to the left of the stripes. There are two diagonal lines of craquelure visible to the light blue pigment in the lower left quadrant, and there is a further slight impression to the canvas above this in the upper left quadrant. To the right and beneath the two aforementioned lines there are some fine, further lines of craquelure and there may be some slight further lines of craquelure in one or two paces. There is a slight possible loss to the impasto tip of an area of dark red pigment in the stripe fifth from left, towards the top of the stripe. To the bottom of the stripe at the far right, there are some small indentations apparent to the blue pigment, which are thought to have possibly occurred while the paint was still wet. At the lower horizontal edge where the stripes are there is some slight rubbing and a faint horizontal line of green pigment, which is thought to possibly be in keeping with the Artist's working method. There are some very faint speckles of mould apparent to the stripes towards the lower half of the canvas, visible upon very close inspection. There is some light surface dirt in places and some traces of studio detritus in places. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals retouching to the aforementioned scratches in the upper right and lower right quadrants. There are also some small lines and spots of retouching around the edges of the canvas, which correspond to the aforementioned rubbing. There may be one or two further small flecks of retouching elsewhere. These have all been very sensitively executed. Unframed. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Robyn Denny was part of the original generation of ‘Young British Artists’, including Hockney, Kitaj and Blake, who emerged from the Royal College of Art in the late 1950s and early 1960s to almost instant acclaim and international success, much as the Goldsmith’s group of Hirst, Emin et al. did 25 years later.

Within less than a decade of leaving college, Denny himself had shown at leading galleries in London, including Kasmin Ltd – at the time the cutting-edge space for contemporary abstract painting in the capital – and had also represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale. In 1973, he became the youngest living artist to receive a full retrospective at the Tate. Not long after, Denny moved to the U.S. and there followed a few decades out of the public eye. However, in in 2007-8, his important early paintings were once again shown in commercial galleries in London and the Tate celebrated his work in a display from their significant holdings, re-establishing Denny as a key figure in British abstraction of the 1960s and '70s.  

The Tate display included Baby Makes Three from 1960 (a prototype for the series of vertical stripe paintings of 1961 of which Madras is one) which was included in the seminal show Situation of the same year – an exhibition that aimed to take on the scale and ambition of American painting whilst simultaneously speaking of the current ‘situation’ in British art, a combination of the painterly and the hard-edge, with both Minimalist and Pop-influences. It was in his Situation works that Denny formally abandoned the abstract-expressionist style of his student-era work and embraced hard-edge painting. In 1961 he embarked on a series of works, such as Track, Ted Bentley, Gully Foyle and Madras that are dominated by vertical bands that are bound within a frame, forming a kind of gateway. Inevitably this lends them an architectural quality, yet one senses that the starting point in these works is always the human body: Denny wanted these paintings to be hung just six inches above the floor so the viewer had a sense that he or she could just step into the picture. The vertical can always take on a (hieratic) human quality, something understood by Denny but also by sculptors of the period, such as William Turnbull, and latterly the likes of Antony Gormley.

Nothing, however, is simple in Denny’s work, despite their stripped down appearance. They are resolutely flat and yet the use of colour, the juxtaposition of the various bands, has a deliberate optical effect, creating ‘space in colour’ (to borrow a phrase from Patrick Heron), even when that colour is contained within plumb-straight lines. As Margaret Garlake has commented, in Denny’s works from the 1960s, ‘despite their overall balance and resolution, they are inherently contradictory, challenging the viewer’s perceptual expectations. There is neither "figure" nor "ground" but a constant process of visual adjustment in which space becomes an ambiguous mental construct rather than a familiar physical quality; colour produces flicker effects and is destabilised while scale, in works where nothing is certain, is perhaps the greatest conundrum as there is nothing to compare it with' (Margaret Garlake, Robyn Denny/Paintings/Collages/1954-1968, exhibition catalogue, Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London, June 2007, unpaginated).

This uncertainty, that Garlake notes is both conceptual as well as perceptual, is something that stems, perhaps, from their making. Denny wasn’t systematic, like his hard-edge counterparts on the Continent: instead the overall design of a painting would be worked out as he went along, the choice of colours made by ‘eye’, so that these sharp, Minimalist works have, at their basis, a painterly feel in their subtlety and modulation.