Confronted by the monumental hard-edge paintings from the mid-1960s of Robyn Denny, who has died aged 83, the viewer may be reminded of the famous figures of the New York School Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko, perhaps. Often in muted blues, greys and browns, and with sharply abutted planes of colour crystallising into a geometrical figure that locks the gaze, these works, however, are the product of a reaction to the British tradition of landscape painting.
Denny's artistic journey to these linear works, which dominated his 1973 Tate retrospective (at the time, he was the youngest artist so to be honoured), began in the 50s, when he was a tachiste a European variant of abstract expressionist. Paint was variously thrown, moved about with a stick, shoved through stencils and set on fire by the self-styled "fully fledged abstract artist".
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