Robyn Denny

Acquired directly from the Artist by the present owner in 1983

London, Molton Gallery, Robyn Denny, 15th November - 9th December 1961, cat. no.4, illustrated;
Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, R. Adams, Skulptur, 7 Junge Englische Maler, 26th January - 3rd March 1963, cat. no.47;
London, Tate, Robyn Denny, 7th March - 23rd April 1973, cat. no.39, illustrated p.33;
London, Sotheby's, The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties, 4th - 11th September 2013, cat. no.49, illustrated p.84.

David Alan Mellor, The Art of Robyn Denny, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2002, illustrated p.74.

Original canvas, there are areas of very slight unevenness, and a tiny possible pressure mark towards the centre left hand edge, only visible in raking light. There is some blooming visible to the stripes at the centre of the work. There is a diagonal line of fine craquelure measuring approximately 15cm. in length running through the centre of these lines. There is also some rubbing and lines of craquelure to the lower horizontal edge, with some further lines of craquelure elsewhere around the edges of the work. There is a scuff to the blue pigment in the upper right corner. There are very faint handling marks and some surface dirt and studio detritus, but this excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Unframed. Not examined under ultraviolet light. Please contact the department if you would like 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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Ted Bentley was one of the key images in Denny’s 1973 retrospective at the Tate – an exhibition that marked a high point in his career (he was, at the time, the youngest living artist ever to receive this accolade). Yet, curiously, the show was also something of a full-stop: not long after, Denny moved to California and there followed decades out of the public eye, until the late 2000s, when his important early paintings were once again shown in commercial galleries and the Tate celebrated him, 35 years after his retrospective, in a display from their significant holdings, re-establishing Denny as a key figure in British abstraction of the 60s and 70s. 

The display included Baby Makes Three from 1960, first shown in the seminal Situation show of the same year – an exhibition that aimed to take on the scale and ambition of American painting whilst simultaneously speaking of the current ‘situation’ in British art, a combination of the painterly and the hard-edge. It was in his Situation paintings that Denny formally abandoned the tachiste style of his student-era work and embraced hard-edge, colour-field painting – roughly in parallel to the American painter Ellsworth Kelly, with whom he shares many confluences (and, crucially, differences too). In 1961, Denny embarked on a series of decisive works, such as the Track series, Ted Bentley, Gully Foyle and Madras (sold in these rooms, June 2017, for £62,500). These paintings are dominated by vertical bands that are then themselves bound within a frame, forming a kind of gateway. Inevitably this lends them an architectural quality, yet one senses that the starting point is always the human body: Denny wanted these paintings to be hung just six inches above the floor so the viewer had a sense that he or she could just step into the picture. The vertical can always take on a (hieratic) human quality, something understood by sculptors of the period, such as William Turnbull. And like Turnbull, even when Denny is at his most reductive, his images are never cold or impersonal. Minimal as they may be, the colours are not chosen according to a formula or a colour wheel; each stripe is laid on in response to the previous one, adjustments are made to the composition and the traces of these changes left in, and the titles of the works are deliberately evocative (if sometimes elusive), cut and pasted from news reports, pulp fiction, TV shows – a hint of Pop within a minimal aesthetic. 

In his early career, Denny created abstract works that could be literally changed and moved around by the viewer. This sense of play remains in his works from the 1960s too. The colours in Ted Bentley – the viewer’s sense of space, of foreground or background – shifts before the viewer’s eyes, albeit with none of the dizzying effects of a Bridget Riley. Instead, it is more a slow reveal, felt less in the eye, more by the entire body.