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| Mary Webb, Red, Green, Black and White, 1976 |
Mary Webb: Extended Square is at Hales Gallery until 12 June 2021
This small, but perfectly formed, exhibition presents a selection of Webb’s paintings from 1969 to the mid-1970s. All square, each painting is a complex exploration of geometry and bold colour – some build on a structure of concentric squares, which superficially reminds one of Frank Stella and Joseph Albers, but Webb’s style is wholly her own and very distinctive; other paintings explore what the gallery text refers to as ‘deconstructed grids’, in which fragments of the grids form ‘overlaps, inlets, and abrupt stops’. These are exhilarating formalist abstractions in the Modernist tradition.
Webb was born in 1939 and studied at Newcastle University, on the course famously directed by Richard Hamilton and Victor Vasarely. At the age of 20, in 1959, while still a student, she saw the seminal exhibition New American Painting at the Tate. This was the first major showing of the Abstract Expressionists in the UK and is credited with galvanising a generation of British artists; Webb has acknowledged it as a ‘pivotal’ experience for her own career, which can be seen as a committed, Modernist exploration of the formal elements of painting concerned with colour and form, flatness and spatial illusion.
Although Webb has been painting for 60 years, she is a new name to me and I am grateful to the Hales Gallery for bringing her to my attention.
(In addition to being open to the public the exhibition can be viewed online via the gallery website.)
See also:
Mary Webb marywebb.co.uk
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| Mary Webb, Extended Square No.2, 1969 |
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| Mary Webb, Red, Black and White, 1971 |
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| Mary Webb, Cream, Black and Emerald, 1972 |
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| Mary Webb, Red and Green IV, 1973 |
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| Mary Webb, Red and Green VI, 1974 |
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| Mary Webb, Sienna, Navy, Black and White, 1976 |
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| Mary Webb, Dunwich, 1977 |
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