joseph scissorhands: Victor Pasmore: Line & Space

Sunday 30 May 2021

Victor Pasmore: Line & Space

Victor Pasmore - Untitled, 1993

Yet another exhibition of abstract art in a few that I have encountered in my rounds of the galleries of late. This most recent though was by one of Britain's pioneers of modernism in art - Victor Pasmore. They are lovely exercises in colour, line and form, in which Pasmore creates his own highly personal, ideosyncratic visual language, as distinctive and instantly recognisable as that of Miro, or Picasso. The exhibition includes examples of Pasmore's painted constructions which I wasn't familiar with but really enjoyed. The addition of sculptural wooden shapes to the two dimensional painted picture plane made for a particularly dynamic fusion. I noticed that Pasmore worked with a very limited colour palette in the works featured here. Greens, blues and browns featured prominently, punctuated by black hieroglyph-style linear squiggles in his abstract paintings. What a shock it was to go into the back room of the upstairs galleries and to encounter Pasmore's representational figurative paintings from the early part of his career. They were a total contrast and real revelation. I thought they were so tender. The paint is so delicately, skillfully, and sensitively handled, especially in the portrait of his wife combing her hair. Further research is required on my behalf to understand more about Pasmore's processes, and why he chose to enact such a radical change in his way of working.