Certain ideals ran through the life of the artist Michael Brick, who has died of a heart attack aged 68, and formed his work and his humanity. He is chiefly associated with abstract or emblematic shapes (although in the past he had worked with figurative landscapes and portraiture). These he presented in a minimalist style, using seemingly silent geometry to say complex and sometimes paradoxical things. They hang on the wall, more like objects than paintings terse, impersonal images with undeniable authority and presence.
They belong to a tradition that began with Kazimir Malevich, the pioneer of geometric abstract art, and fed into European constructivism, yet Brick's sophisticated thought earned him a niche of his own. He exhibited widely, and his work is represented in many public collections, including those of the British Council, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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