Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Lot 81AR
Alan Reynolds(British, 1926-2014)Forms Black White and Grey 100.8 x 97.5 cm. (39 5/8 x 38 3/8 in.)
12 June 2019, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £22,562.50 inc. premium
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Christopher Dawson
Head of Department
Ingram Reid
Director
Alan Reynolds (British, 1926-2014)
Forms Black White and Grey
signed 'Reynolds' (lower right)
oil on board
100.8 x 97.5 cm. (39 5/8 x 38 3/8 in.)
signed 'Reynolds' (lower right)
oil on board
100.8 x 97.5 cm. (39 5/8 x 38 3/8 in.)
Footnotes
Provenance
With Abbott & Holder, circa 1965, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
In the final years of the 1950s Alan Reynold's practice transitioned from depictive to abstracted landscape motifs. Then in the first few years of the 1960s the transition completed to fully 'concrete' abstraction, with all lingering tangible references to landscape abandoned. He then embarked on a series which he latterly referred to as 'Ovoids', to which the present example belongs.
'In 1962 [Alan Reynolds] introduced an oval format into his paintings. The oval, of course, goes back in twentieth-century art to Braque and Picasso in 1910-14, and Mondrian made it his own from 1912-13. [Reynolds] will also have known Victor Pasmore's experiments with the oval from his exhibitions at the Redfern in the early '50s, and those of Kenneth Martin, Adrian Heath and other more or less constructive artists. For the Cubists, the oval had been a means of encapsulating and concentrating the almost sculptural image of the figure or still life, of helping the integration of space and solid, and of not allowing the composition to dissipate towards the corners. Braque talked of it enabling him to 'rediscover the sense of the horizontal and vertical'. It began to break the convention of the rectangular picture as a window beyond, and Picasso had wrapped rope around one of his ovals as if to assert its self-containedness as an object belonging to the work itself. More recently Pasmore had taken that process further by packing his ovals with interlocking compositions which admitted no space, and which Alastair Grieve had likened to shields' (Michael Harrison, Alan Reynolds, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2011, p.61).