Marc Vaux

Leicestershire Education Authority 
Private Collection

Original canvas, there is a single staple tot eh lower right hand edge, with a small canvas imperfection at the extreme left hand edge, visible upon close inspection. The canvas undulates very slightly in the top right and bottom left corners. There is minor surface dirt, with a very minor scuff to the top right quadrant, visible upon extremely close inspection. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Please contact the department for an ultraviolet light report. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Marc Vaux rose to prominence in the 1960s, with his participation in the landmark Situation exhibition of 1960. Since then Vaux has continually developed his non-figurative painting style, exploring a range of different media from drawing and painting to three-dimensional reliefs and sculpture. Born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1932, Vaux attended the Swindon School of Art, before completing his art studies at the Slade School of Art in 1960. He also taught art for many years, becoming Head of Painting at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, London, before retiring from teaching in 1989 to concentrate on his own work. Marc Vaux has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and his work is represented in many public collections including Tate, London; Arts Council of Great Britain; Victoria and Albert Museum; City Art Gallery, Leeds; York Art Gallery; and Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany.1964 marked a juncture in Vaux's work. Moving away from the cross structure of previous works, Vaux began to paint within and out of a square form, sometimes rotated into a diamond. The year also signaled a dramatic shift in his palette. In the previous year George Rowney started manufacturing acrylic paint, which Vaux has celebrated as one of the great artistic developments of the age. The new quick drying paint allowed new developments in his work such as letting the paint stain unprimed canvas and flow in ways which would be impossible with oil paint. Influenced by Cezanne and Mattise, Vaux began to explore colour as a signifier of feeling; colour was used freely without being attributed to any rationalizing order. Similarly the dichotomy between the oppositional forces of the gesture and form become increasingly blurred in this period. The interaction between the two is more ambiguous and in many works the box form becomes the gesture.

 

The paintings from 1964 deal with two strands of artistic thinking. They suggest conflict, but also co-existence. They deal with a universal human questioning of the presence of sublime beauty in the rational and reasoned day-to-day. Vaux's work celebrates modernity and its achievements, but also seeks to capture rare, fleeting beauty.