Robyn Denny

Robyn Denny (1930–2014) was a leading figure in British abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s and one of the artists who helped shift the focus of post-war British art away from landscape and towards a more international, urban form of abstraction. His large-scale paintings, characterised by sharply defined structures, layered fields of colour and an imposing sense of scale, brought him considerable international recognition.

Born in Surrey, Denny studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1951 to 1953 and at the Royal College of Art from 1954 to 1957. At the RCA he became part of a younger generation determined to challenge the prevailing influence of the St Ives painters. The impact of contemporary American art, particularly the scale and ambition of Abstract Expressionism, proved crucial to his development.

The Redfern Gallery was among the first London galleries to show Denny’s work. In 1957, the year he graduated from the Royal College, he was included in the gallery’s influential exhibition Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today. The exhibition brought together thirty British painters responding to French Tachisme and American Abstract Expressionism and has since been recognised as an important moment in the emergence of a younger generation of British abstractionists. Denny also exhibited in Redfern’s Summer Exhibition in 1957 and 1958.

Denny soon became closely associated with other young abstract painters including Richard Smith, John Hoyland, Bernard Cohen and William Green. He helped organise Place at the ICA in 1959 and, the following year, was a central participant in Situation, an exhibition of large-scale abstract painting at the RBA Galleries that challenged both the scale and outlook of much contemporary British art.

During the early 1960s his paintings became increasingly architectural. Broad vertical and horizontal bands, repeated frames and sharply abutting planes of muted colour created an ambiguous sense of depth, simultaneously suggesting doors, screens, corridors and illuminated spaces without becoming descriptive. The urban environment, cinema, advertising and the scale of American painting were more important to him than the landscape tradition against which his generation was reacting.

Denny’s international reputation developed rapidly. His work was included in British Painting in the 60’s at Tate in 1963 and in Documenta III, Kassel, in 1964. In 1966 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, and his work subsequently appeared in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States.

In 1973 Tate mounted a major retrospective of Denny’s work. At the time he was the youngest artist to have been given such an exhibition by the gallery. The exhibition subsequently travelled to Germany and confirmed his position as one of the principal British abstract painters of his generation.

His work continued to evolve during the following decades. The hard-edged structures of the 1960s gradually gave way to broader and more atmospheric fields of colour, while later paintings could be monumental in scale and increasingly spare in their organisation. Denny lived in Los Angeles between 1981 and 1986 before returning to London, where he continued to work on large paintings and three-dimensional constructions.

The Redfern Gallery renewed its association with Denny in 1992 with Three Artists, Three Decades, an exhibition bringing together his work with that of John Hoyland and Gwyther Irwin. More recently his work has continued to feature in Redfern exhibitions of post-war British art, maintaining a connection with the gallery that began at the outset of his career.

Denny’s work is held in major public collections in Britain and internationally, including Tate and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Tate holds an extensive group of his paintings, drawings and prints.