Bob Law @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - In association with Richard Saltoun

Bob Law

in association with Richard Saltoun

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

Through 18 December, 2021

“I have, or I think I have, my perfect work in my mind’s eye. To bring that work into reality or existence is another matter - there is always some small flaw. Some improvement to be made. And it is this seeking after quality that most interests me... The work becomes a very serious trial and examination process in which the artist is solely responsible to himself for the quality and conviction of the work. The justification of the work is in the endeavour of the artist to seek out the quality and skill within his own mind and correlate his inner spirit with the art he can touch and make.” - Bob Law, July 1977

"We met [Bob Law] in, I think, 1974. Most of his paintings were painted in dark ink: blue, dark rust, or violet. A single colour covered the whole surface ... These were very allusive paintings, severe but not sad. Here was a strange limitless night, two contradictory aspects since one should have excluded the other. The sense of emptiness seemed to cohabit with tranquil serenity." from Giuseppe Panza: Memories of a Collector, 2007.

For the first time in Naples, Thomas Dane Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the pioneering artist BOB LAW (1934-2004). Comprising works from 1950s – 2000s, this survey show a critical overview of Bob Law’s expansive career, and features key examples from his major bodies of work, including Field Drawings, Chairs, Castles, and the Black Paintings.

Considered amongst the founders of British Minimalism, Bob Law's work defies easy categorisation and ranges across drawing, painting and sculpture and retains a firm yet always uneasy embrace of pure abstraction. As opposed to the New York-based minimalist artists, Bob Law's practice drew on his engagement with the English landscape and his esoteric range of interests.

Championed by the critic Lawrence Alloway, whom he met while in Cornwall, Bob Law exhibited with Peter Hobbs in Two Young British Painters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1960). There followed one-man shows at some of the most prestigious galleries across Europe, including Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, Germany (1970) and the increasingly influential Lisson Gallery, London, UK (1971). Major institutional solo exhibitions include 10 Black Paintings 1965-70, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1974); Bob Law: Paintings and Drawings 1959-1978, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, curated by Nicholas Serota (1978); and Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK, which travelled to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Assorted Paper, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2017); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London, UK (2014); A House of Leaves, curated by Vincent Honoré, at DRAF, London, UK (2013). His work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including Tate, London, UK; the British Museum, London, UK; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, amongst others.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi, 69, 80122 Napoli

www.thomasdanegallery.com

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Bob Law @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London - Ideas, Energies, Transmutations

Bob Law: Ideas, Energies, Transmutations
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
3 September - 31 October 2020

Richard Saltoun Gallery opens to the public for the first time in six months with an exhibition of work by the British conceptual artist BOB LAW (b. 1934 - d. 2004). Beginning in the late 1950s, Bob Law developed an abstract vocabulary that was rooted in corporeal experience yet oriented toward metaphysical concerns. Audacious in their minimalism, his drawings and paintings were shown alongside works by Jo Baer, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman in the early 1970s. Unlike these New York-based artists, however, Bob Law's work evolved out of an engagement with the English landscape and an esoteric range of interests including alchemy, nature mysticism, numerology, and palaeontology. Curated by the art historian Anna Lovatt, this exhibition demonstrates how Law invested austere forms with affective, wry, or whimsical qualities, contributing to a re-enchantment of abstract art that has continued since his death in 2004. 

'Ideas, Energies, Transmutations' begins with a selection of the Field drawings Bob Law produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the landscape surrounding his St. Ives home, he produced a series of works in which he situated his body in relation to elements of the natural world, creating: "a kind of environmental chart, a thesis of ideas, energies, transmutations." Through this diagrammatic process Law pursued an ecstatic communion with the earth, rendered frankly erotic in some of these drawings. The skewed frames of his large-scale paintings first emerged in the Field drawings, suggesting that even Bob Law's more abstract works are numinously charged. 

Also featured in the exhibition is the ambitious, rarely-seen relief Hole within a Whole (1980). Punctuated by nails and perforated by a small rectangular window, this imposing work relates to the hypothetical sculpture Here Comes the Sun (The Devil's View) (1980), which Bob Law envisaged to mark the dawn of the third millennium. The proposed sculpture was to consist of a twenty-by-thirty-foot steel wall intended to block out the sun, save a small rectangular hole, through which light would shine onto an obelisk. Bob Law proposed that the relative positions of the sun, the wall, and the obelisk would be determined by an astronomer. 

During the early 1970s, Bob Law gained notoriety in the British press for monumental works like Mister Paranoia IV 20.11.70 (No. 95) and Drawing (Black Scribble) 10.2.72, both included in this exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery. Far from empty or "meaningless" as some commentators implied, these works were "brooded-over pictures," upon which Law meditated while sitting in a chair in his studio. The chair subsequently became part of Bob Law's sculptural repertoire, recalling his early work as a carpenter and introducing a humorous anthropomorphism also seen in the sculptures Young Obelisk (1981) and Reclining Obelisk (1984). Visually distinct from Law's abstract paintings and drawings, these sculptures share their Beckettian sense of absurdity and human vulnerability. 

Bob Law's work has featured in numerous exhibitions, including 'Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979' (group) at Tate Britain, London, UK (2016); 'Artists and Poets' (group) at Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015) curated by Ugo Rondinone; 'Abstract Drawing' (group), curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London, UK (2014); 'A House of Leaves' (group), curated by Vincent Honoré, at DRAF, London, UK (2013); 'Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings', Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK, which travelled to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (1999); 'Bob Law' at Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1978) and '10 Black Paintings 1965-70', Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1974), curated by Sir Nicholas Serota. His work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including Tate, London, UK; the British Museum, London, UK; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, amongst others.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY
41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS
richardsaltoun.com

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