Brian Wall came to St Ives as a young artist in the 1950s and was, for a time, Secretary of the Penwith Society. His early work was heavily influenced by Mondrian, but he evolved away from this aesthetic whilst working as a welder in Barbara Hepworth’s studio.
Though obvious parallels with the work of Anthony Caro can be drawn, it should be noted Caro adopted the techniques of welding metal several years after Wall, and Wall was widely perceived by critics of the time to be under-sung. After working in the thick of swinging Sixties London for a time, Wall went to the San Francisco Bay area of America where he continued to base himself for over thirty years. He was a
faculty member at the Central School of Art in London, and a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley.
