Jeremy MoonDrawing ['68] 1968

Drawing [‘68] is one of a group of fourteen works in pencil and oil pastel in Tate’s collection (T12222–T12235) by the abstract artist Jeremy Moon. This drawing comprises a grid defined in yellow lines that forms an uneven quadrilateral. Some of the twenty-six spaces between the grid lines are coloured red and black, others are left uncoloured. An imagined diagonal line of symmetry that cuts across the form creates the illusion that the lower part of the quadrilateral mirrors the upper part.

Drawings formed a very significant part of Moon’s output and Tate’s examples, produced between 1967 and 1973, date from the latter part of the artist’s short career. Moon was one of a generation of British abstract painters that emerged in the early 1960s and included Robyn Denny (born 1930) and John Hoyland (born 1934). Their work, which owed much to American Hard-Edge and Colour Field painting, was large scale, colourful and rigorously non representational. Despite their small size, Moon’s drawings share many of the concerns of his paintings, in terms of their treatment of space, colour and form… (read more)