Installation Views / Text
Bob Law, Kisses and Crosses, is the first in a new series of one-room exhibitions at the gallery. The In Focus presentations will punctuate the gallery’s exhibition programme, offering an opportunity to highlight a specific artwork or body of work within an artist’s oeuvre. These exhibitions will draw upon the gallery’s specialisms across 20th and 21st century art.
Encompassing the defining motifs of Bob Law’s practice, Kisses and Crosses builds on his earlier radical works to explore philosophical questions around universal understanding. Each painting is constructed through the gradual accumulation of thin colour washes, layered until the surface resolves into an apparently uniform black. Evolving from the Black Paintings (for which Law is best known), this method produces a rich velvet-like surface which, on close viewing, reveals underlying hues modulating from blue to violet. These subtle complexities defy photographic reproduction and invite direct experience.
Law subsequently activated each surface by incising it with a ruler and screw, carefully scratching diagrammatic imagery through the pigment, jaggedly exposing the white paper beneath. The physical act adds a tactile counterpoint to the paintings’ visual restraint. The resulting pared-down, plan-like imagery relates closely to his Field Drawings of the late 1950s, produced shortly after his move to Cornwall and following formative encounters with Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon.
At the time, Cornwall - particularly St Ives - was a hub for progressive abstract artists seeking distance from the conservatism that still dominated post-war British institutions. The ‘Field’ drawings capture Law’s corporeal and metaphysical contemplation of lying on his back in a Cornish field, often experienced in a heightened state of consciousness. These works map Law’s position in relation to his immediate environment, in his own words: ‘The early Field paintings were about the position of myself on the face of the earth and the environmental conditions around me. These included the position of the stars, sun and moon, and the direction of the wind, and my position in the world in a particular place at a specific time.’1
Structured within a rhomboid frame that represents the perimeter of the field, Law distilled these experiences into a system of graphic, abstract ideograms. Elemental forms and traditional symbols would become foundational to his practice, underpinning a sustained investigation into the radical distillation of visual language. Seminal in their restraint, these works positioned Law as a founding figure of British Minimalism.
St Ives also exposed Law to developments in American abstract art, with artists such as Patrick Heron galvanizing a fervent transatlantic dialogue around modernism. This exchange was further catalysed by landmark exhibitions including The New American Painting, held at Tate in 1959. Artists such as Ad Reinhardt - renowned for his large monochrome canvases and ‘black paintings’ - were well known to members of the St Ives group. Yet Law was among the few British artists to fully embrace hard-line minimalism, setting his work apart from the more gestural tendencies of second-generation St Ives painters.
By the mid-1970s, Minimalism was gaining institutional recognition in the UK. As Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Nicholas Serota championed the movement through a series of groundbreaking exhibitions that introduced British audiences to artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. Within this international framework, Bob Law’s work was increasingly acknowledged, culminating in a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1978.
Despite these transatlantic connections, Law’s practice remained distinct from that of his American contemporaries. His meditative practice remained rooted in the English landscape and was informed by his wide-ranging interests in Asian philosophy, mysticism, alchemy, and palaeontology. Kisses and Crosses reflects this philosophical engagement with universal forms and the most elementary systems of visual meaning. Shortly after completing the series in 2000, Law described his intention:
‘Kisses and Crosses is a development that surfaces from the field and then castle series of painting [and] drawings with the awareness of gestalt intuition of examining the meanings of the most primitive sign communication, which goes right back to the source of just about everything - even before primitive drawing around a hand. When castles stood upright in their ivory towers or various positions out of the blue a castle had a flag of the most simple meanings. Crosses can mean so many different phenomena, from wrong to right in fact the use of the nought doesn’t mean anything, it is not used in roman numbers. It exists as a real nothing, and we still use this successful system that built so much fantastic architecture and roads.’2
The series informed Law’s only suite of prints, a set of etchings now held in major public collections including Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
1 Bob Law cited in: Bond, Antony; Melvin, Jo; Lovatt, Anna; Batchelor, David and Panz, Giuseppe, Bob Law: A Retrospective, London, 2009, p.30
2 Bob Law cited in: Bond, Antony; Melvin, Jo; Lovatt, Anna; Batchelor, David and Panz, Giuseppe, Bob Law: A Retrospective, London, 2009, p.208