Painting 1957

Denny is a painter of abstracts and a maker of constructions in various media including oil, acrylic, collage and screen-print. His career brought him international fame with numerous one-man exhibitions throughout the world, including a major retrospective show at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1973. As both an artist and a lecturer at a number of art institutions including the Slade School of Art, he has been a highly influential figure in the development of British abstract art. Denny is a member of a generation that grew up after the 2nd World War in Europe which was determined to re-invent the world in general, and art in particular, all over again. An exhibition of the American Abstract Expressionists at the Tate Gallery in 1956 was highly influential in bringing to Denny's attention a manner of work that attempted to break free from art conventions and create a new beginning for art. Painting 1957 is an early work of Denny's. His concerns at this time lay with the 'primary act of painting' - attending to its form, colour and composition - as opposed to representing the world we live in. In this way he hoped to draw the viewer's attention to the painting as an object in itself, instead of as an illusion of nature. His use of letters as simply visual forms that make no words and have no meaning again reinforces the abstract nature of the work. Denny strives for ambiguity in his paintings so their full meaning is not grasped immediately but only becomes clearer after longer periods of thought and observation.