Robyn Denny was part of a ‘golden generation’ of artists, including Richard Smith (Denny’s great friend and early collaborator), David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Peter Blake, who emerged from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
These young artists, fully attuned to the emerging youth and pop culture in Britain and America, were perhaps the first generation of art students to go from the College straight into careers – making them precursors of the ‘Young British Artists’ who emerged from Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s - Hirst, Lucas, Emin et al.
Initially working in a raw, Abstract Expressionist manner (which included setting fire to his graduation piece), Denny had by 1960 embraced hard-edged minimalism. It was this kind of work that he showed at the ground-breaking exhibition Situation of that year, held in the Royal Society of British Artists’ Galleries in London, that aimed to take on the scale and ambition of American painting, whilst simultaneously speaking of the current ‘situation’ in British art, in which the painterly and the hard-edged, as well as Minimalist tendencies and Pop-influences, mixed with undogmatic freedom.
The Tate’s Baby Makes Three by Denny featured in Situation and this is in many ways the prototype for the series of stripe paintings he made in 1961. Works such as those in the Track series, Ted Bentley, Gully Foyle and Madras are dominated by vertical bands that are bound within a square of colour, which in turn creates a sense of a gateway.
This architectural quality is very deliberate, but Denny spoke of architecture being meaningless unless activated by humans. As a result, the starting point in these works is the viewer themselves, an idea Denny explored in 1959 in the seminal exhibition Place, where the works were bolted together on the floor to form walls that the viewer walked between. Denny wanted his hard-edged works of the ‘60s to be hung just six inches above the floor so the viewer had a sense that they could step into the picture.
Despite their stripped-down appearance, works like Madras play complex perceptual games. They are resolutely flat and yet the use of colour, namely 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 strict geometries.
As Margaret Garlake has commented about 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).
Whilst Garlake notes a lack of ‘figure’ and ‘ground’, one can’t help feeling that the vertical stripes have something of a human quality, something that was discussed by minimalist artists at the time, most notably by sculptors like Anthony Caro and William Turnbull, the latter especially creating modernist hieratic figures out of the simple juxtaposition of a vertical and a cross-beam.
Within less than a decade of leaving the RCA, Denny was showing at London’s leading gallery, Kasmin, alongside American hard-edge and colour-field painters to whom he should be considered equal. He 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 in London. Not long afterwards, Denny moved to Los Angeles and there followed a few decades out of the public eye. However, in 2007-08, 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.
