Colour Box II
Denny studied painting at St. Martin's School of Art in London and held various teaching positions at art schools throughout the 1950s. He is regarded as being one of the first British artists to respond to American abstract expressionism, developing an abstract style free of natural associations. In his early work, like the American Jasper Johns (b.1930), he used stencilled and collaged lettering in his work. The Ferens owns such a work by Denny, painting of 1967. Colour Box II is one of a series of five multiple screen-prints produced in 1969. Each image in the series was an assemblage of acrylic sheets superimposed on each other, contained in a specially constructed frame. Denny's Colour Box series focuses on the tonal values of the colours themselves; he draws attention to the differing tones through the formal construction of the box, in which planes of colour are 'stacked' within the frame. To Denny, the most important part of the Colour Boxes was the 'entry image', the point at which the spectator's eye meets the work. Here, this area is considered to be the lower centre of the image.
