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FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB LAW In 1989, Bob Law showed at Clinton Tweedie's 312 Lenox Street Gallery in Melbourne. He was interviewed by Roger Taylor of Radio 3RRR for his Gotham City Gossip spot and the following quotations are from his replies. On his move to St Ives in 1957 - I rented the cottage from an artist called Trevor Bell. Roger Hilton bought it for £400 when I left Cornwall. No water, no electric, no gas, nothing, just a stand pipe outside. The Black Paintings started in 1960 in the cottage in Cornwall. Then they were thick impasto paint put on with a blade, made from powder pigment and linseed oil and lots of other ingredients because I just couldn't afford tube paint. They have all gone, disappeared, gone, destroyed, got lost. There's none left. I gave up the series of Black Paintings and there was also a series of White paintings on raw canvas with just a line round the edge, and I did about a hundred Black Paintings through the years and I just couldn't do them any more. I got to the end of the line. I took up sculpture. Then in a few years...a few bits of sculpture - its exciting at first and then it gets harder and harder. Something with sort of A B C - minimal shapes in sculpture, simple pyramids and obelisks and balls, then along came the chairs. A lot of people wanted Black Paintings and there weren't any left so I did this series of black watercolours - which include all the colours - red, yellow, blue, green and purple - layers and layers and layers of thin watercolour built up until you get this blackness with all the depth of colour in it. I did a series of about sixty over a period of eighteen months. More or less the same technique only watercolour instead of acrylic. On the Lisson Gallery and Karsten Schubert - Nicholas Logsdail was very important. I was with him when he first began. He was an antique dealer and then he was an artist himself and started collecting interesting artists around him and he started a gallery - just an old butchers shop in those days. He's done very well. Karsten Schubert was Nicholas Logsdail's assistant and he split off after learning the trade and asked me whether I'd go with him because I hadn't been doing too well at that time so I went with him. That's it. That's the way the cookie crumbles. I'd made a few chairs and I was looking through some books one day and I saw Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper. I thought, that's a good subject - everyone tries it so l think I'll have a go at it. I made it without the figures so that the broken chair is Judas' chair and the centre chair with the cross in is Christ's chair - and then the other common disciples' chairs - and I made it in a most simple way, worked out all the proportions of the spaces between the legs and the backs, in wood and then I had it cast in bronze. The chair is... how I really started it, I used to sit and look at my Black Paintings for hour after hour and meditate on them and one day I got in such a state - and I thought the painting is here and I'm sitting in this chair and I'd like to make this whole thing - I'd like to make the thing I'm sitting in - a chair- as a contemplative object. It's also structurally... you have a foundation which gives you a discipline to work to and it has logic - it's just not abstract but it is built in a most simple three-dimensional way. I made them from scrap wood and split, chopped with the grain, and just slot them together, glue them up, clamp them...and later on, last year, I started collecting driftwood on the pebble beaches of Kent, and trying to use the wood as I found it and fitting it together and the beautiful silvery salt bleached timber - just leave it natural - just glue it up. I lived on Richmond Hill from 1964 to 1969.1 was doing Black Paintings [and] writing poetry in lead, which I've always been interested in. They were to do with my experience of the countryside, which I'd just left. The letters are stamped on with letter stamps - that's all really. It was mostly old lead from old roofs, scrap yards. The Dog Poems - they are to do with... they go back to some of the old original field drawings and relate to one particular poem about a dog on the far side of his field. When he looks out across the field, and you've got to think how a dog thinks - that dog marks his own territory by urinating around that field and it becomes his field - and if any other dogs come in there it gets angry, so l divided up these lead pieces in fields and just worked with three dogs, to see how many I could get in each different field and I got six different poems from it. It's a shape that's been with me from the very beginnings of my drawings - over a long period of time, it became an obelisk. I used to go out in the fields and lay down and watch - it's very windy down there - and watch the clouds race across and feel the earth spinning, feel the wind, watch the trees - just looking up in the sky and this is a sort of plan of those experiences I had laying in those remote places. The smoke coming out [see p.12 top] is a formulation of what I described as energy. I would have loved to have made sculptures from them but it's an impossible configuration. There's no way you could make sculpture of it so l just left them as drawings. You think twenty-four hours a day and you work four hours. It's just got to be good, truthful, strong - I don't like fussy paintings and people that work laboriously. I like strong simple statements. This is a poem I wrote in Twickenham, when I'd just built my new studio:
Who is Mr Crabtree, the man with the hacksaw Who indeed is Mr Cell, the amino-acid man up the spiral staircase Through your Grandmother's bedroom To a distant light beyond the red shift To division of divisions, Regiments of divisions, Marching through the reflections, Of a mirrorless mirror. Would you like to be Daddy-long-legs on the greatest spaceship Earth odyssey? We are all suspects, Being sussed out. |
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BIOGRAPHY
Robert Law was born in 1934 in Brentford, Middlesex. At fifteen he was apprenticed as an architectural designer, but turned to building work and carpentry instead. He taught himself to paint, encouraged by avant-garde artists in St Ives, where he lived from 1958-60, and by the critic Lawrence Alloway. In 1960 Law was shown at the I.C.A. in 'Two Young British Painters'. In 1961 he won a French Government Award to work in Aix-en-Provence, and in 1962 was given his first one-man show at Grabowski Gallery, London. Since then he has exhibited extensively in Britain, Europe and the U.S.A. In the 1970s and early 1980s he was represented by Lisson Gallery, London, and he featured in 'British Artists of the '60s',Tate Gallery, London (1977). Major solo shows include 'Ten Black Paintings', Museum of Modern Art. Oxford (1974); 'Bob Law: Paintings and Drawings 1959-78', Whitecahpel Gallery, London; and 'Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings', Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1999). Among public collections holding his work are the Tate Gallery and British Museum, London, the Arts Council of England, and the Guggenheim, New York. PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Victoria and Albert Museum, London Worcester College, Oxford New College, Oxford Contemporary Art Society, London The British Council, London City Museum and Art Gallery, Peterborough Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam The Panza Collection, Milan Museum of Modern Art, New York City Art Gallery, Johannesburg The Sol LeWitt Collection, Connecticut The Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS 1962 Grabowski Gallery and 1967/68 1963 Christchurch College, Oxford 1970 Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf Onnasch Galerie, Berlin 1971 Lisson Gallery and 1975, 80, 82 1974 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1977 Lisson Gallery, New York Rolf Preisig, Basel 1978 Whitechapel Art Gallery (Retrospective) 1979 Gillespie-DeLaage, Paris 1982 Gunnersbury Park (Rainbow sculpture) 1988 and 89 Karsten Schubert Gallery 1989 Clinton Tweedie, Lenox Street Gallery, Melbourne 1990 Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York 1992 The Platform Gallery, Folkestone 1996 Private Gallery and 1999 1999 Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge TOPSELECTED MIXED EXHIBITIONS 1960 'Two Young British Painters', ICA, London 1960 'Situation, RBA Galleries', London 1961 'New London Situation', Marlborough New London, London 1961 '6 Painters, 2 Sculptors', Rawinsky Gallery, London 1962/63 'Situation', Arts Council Touring Exhibition 1968 Open Hundred, Arts Council, Belfast 1969 John Moores, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool 1970 Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London 1970 Paperworks, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1971 Wall Show, Lisson Gallery, London 1971 Art Spectrum Show, Alexandra Palace, London 1971 Modern Paintings from Oxford College Collections, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1972 Seven Exhibitions, Tate Gallery, London 1972 Small Paintings and Drawings, Arts Council Touring Exhibition 1972 Drawing, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1973 7 Aus London, Kunsthalle, Bern 1973 Critic's Choice, Arthur Tooth & Sons, London 1974 Paintings Exhibition, Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Edinburgh 1975 Contemporary Art Society, Mall Galleries, London 1975 Baer, Charlton, Law, Mangold, Ryman, Lisson Gallery, London 1976 Arte Inglese Oggi, Palazzo Reale, Milan 1977 Fine Arts Building, New York 1977 Lisson Gallery, London 1977 Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery , London 1977 British Artists of the Sixties, Tate Gallery, London 1977 British Painting 1952-77, Royal Academy, London 1977 Avant-Garde Russe, Avant Garde Minimaliste, Galerie Gillespie-de Laage, Paris 1978 Lisson Gallery, London 1978 20 Century Drawings, Chelsea School of Art, London 1977 Recent Arts Council Awards and Purchases ,Serpentine Gallery,London 1979 Art Actuel en Belgique et en Grande-Bretagne, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussells 1979 Tate 79 Exhibition, Tate Gallery, London 1979 Through the Summer, Lisson Gallery, London 1979 The Native Land, Mostyn Art Gallery, Llandudno 1979 Summer Show, Galerie Gillespie-de Laage, Paris 1979 Malerei Schwarz, Malerei Weiss, Kunstlerhaus, Hamburg 1979 Artists Books, Galerie Ldia Megert, Bern 1980 35 Ans de L Apiaw, Museum Ville de Liege, Liege 1980 British Art 1940-1980, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London 1980 John Moores, 12 Exhibitions, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1981 Continuing Through the Summer, Lisson Gallery, London 1981 Schwarz ( Black Exibition), Stadtische Kunsthalle, Dôsseldorf 1981 British Sculpture since 1900, (Part II, 1950-1980) Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1982 British Contemporary Art Exhibition, Japan Tokyo Metropolitan Museum Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka Fukuoka Art Museum Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo 1983 Drawing in Air : An Exhibition of Sculptors Drawings 1882-1982 Leeds City Art Gallery Ceolfrith Arts Gallery, Sunderland Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea 1984 Rosc 84,Guiness Hop Store, Dublin 1984-85 'The British Art Show II', touring exhibition, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Southampton 1985 St Ives 1939-64, Tate Gallery, London 1985-86 'The British Art Show II', Australia and New Zealand: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane National Art Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne National Art Gallery, Wellington 1986 'Falls the Shadow ',Hayward Gallery, London 1986 'Changing Group Exhibition', Lisson Gallery, London 1987 'British Art in the 20th Century', Royal Academy, London 1987 'Englische Kunst im 20 Jahrundhert', Staats Galerie 1987 'Vessel', Serpentine Gallery, London 1987 'British Art in the Twentieth Century', Royal Academy, London and Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart 1987 'Britannica: Trente Ans de Sculpture' : Musee des Beaux-Arts,Le Harve, Musee Evreux & The Architecture School of Normandie, Rouen Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (1989) Central Regional d' Art Contemporain, Toulouse (1989) 1987-89 'The Experience of Landscape', Arts Council Touring Exhibition: Derby, Huddersfield, York, Wolverhampton, Exeter, Worcester, Barnsley, Stoke, London, Walsall, Newtown, Ayr, Stirling, Wakefield 1988 'Le Couleur Seule, I'Experience du Monochrome', Musee St Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon 1988 'Changing Group Exhibition', Karsten Schubert Gallery, London 1988-89'The Presence of Painting', Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield 1989 'A Spiritual Dimension', touring exhibition, Peterborough Art Gallery, Herbert Gallery, Coventry, Worcester City Museum, Winchester Gallery 1989 'Modern Britsh Water Colour Show', Grob Gallery, London. Hanne Darboven, Gary Hume, Bob Law, Julian Lethbridge, Karsten Schubert Gallery, London 1990 Ipswich, Shipley Art Gallery 1991-92 'The LeWitt Collection', Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut 1996 'From Figure to Object, a Century of Sculptors' Drawings', Frith Street Gallery and Karsten Schubert Gallery 1999 Tate Gallery, St Ives, 'As Dark as Light'. Three different displays of paintings and drawings by Bob Law from the London Tate Collection 1999 'Small Sculptures and Early Drawings by Bob Law', Richard Salmon Gallery, London 1999 'Jerwood Painting Prize 1999', Exhibition of the Seven Shortlisted Artists. Jerwood Space Gallery, London. 2000 Live In Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain, 1965-75, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2001 Live In Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain, 1965-75, Museu do Chiado, Lisbon2001 Whitechapel Centenary, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2001 Out of Line: Drawings from the Arts Council Collection, Touring 2001 Panza Collection, Guggenheim Museum, New York (in preparation) TOPBIBLIOGRAPHY (Chronological)
INTERVIEWS Bob Law in conversation with Dick Norton and Carsten Lewis: BBC Overseas Service, Berlin, 11.70. Bob Law in conversation with Richard Cork: cat. "Ten Black Paintings 1965-70'. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1974. 'Robbie': BBCTV interview with fyfe Robertson at the Hayward Gallery, London, August 15 1977. Transcript published in Art monthly, no.11, 10.77. 'Gotham City Gossip': Bob Law in conversation with Roger Taylor, Melbourne Radio, 25.03.89FILMS 'Tree' and 'Under Pressure'. 16mm black and white film 100-foot run: shot on 16mm clockwork Bolex at Ealing Common in conjunction with Tony Morgan of Dusseldorf. Processed and edited by Tony Morgan. Shown: Art Spectrum 71, Alexander Palace, London, Aug1971. Produkt Cinema, Dusseldorf, April 1971. 'Film Show', Situation Gallery, London, Sept 71.Digital movie by Polywylde, Jan 2000. |