Rational Concepts

Catalogue entry

P07427 [from] RATIONAL CONCEPTS 1977 [P07424-P07430; complete]

P07424 inscribed ‘Dilworth’ bottom right and ‘38/100’
P07425 inscribed ‘Anthony Hill’ on back and ‘38/100’
P07426 inscribed ‘Malcolm Hughes’ on back and ‘38/100’
P07427 inscribed ‘Peter Lowe’ on back and ‘38/100’
P07428 inscribed ‘Kenneth Martin 77’ on back and ‘38/100’
P07429 inscribed ‘Jeffrey Steele’ on back and ‘38/100’
P07430 inscribed ‘G. Wise C’ bottom right and ‘38/100’
Seven screenprints, printed at Edition Hoffman, Friedberg, and published by Lydia Megert, Berne and Edition Hoffman, each 23 1/2×23 1/2 (59.6×59.6)
Purchased from Gillian Wise-Ciobotaru (Grant-in-Aid) 1980

The artists were selected by Lydia Megert and the portfolio was designed by Rudolf Mattes. The portfolio is accompanied by an introduction by Richard Paul Lohse, ‘Constructive Art in England Today’, and short statements by each artist.

Dilworth's statement makes an analogy between the formal structure of a sentence: ‘If I say “I draw a line” I use Subject-Verb-Object’, and a work of art, stressing the necessity for equilibrium.

Hill's screenprint is the same configuration as an engraved laminated work (1972); it ‘plays on hexorientation: silhouettes of cubes and fragments of cubes appear and disappear in different ways’.

Hughes explains that he is interested in what can be realised with numbers, given the conceptual basis of a numerical system. The present drawing ‘is concerned with a set of simple operations upon the position and unit length of the prime numbers within the natural number sequence 1–20’.

In Lowe's print ‘an eight by eight unit grid is removed from the inside of a ten by ten unit grid. The remaining square path is subdivided into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 groups of squares and every other group is painted black’.

Martin's print is one of the extensive series of ‘Chance and Order’ works, in which randomly selected numbers within the sequence set around the image area are used to determine the configuration of lines.

Steele's print is ‘Sg V 2’; it is one of a series each of which consists of ‘a set of elements whose relations are governed by syntactic transformations’.

Wise's print is the fifth in a related series of works, the first being a plexiglass and thread construction, 1968. The second is a drawing made about the same time, and the third and fourth are a painting and gouache study both in the Tate Collection (T01965 and T01966).

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1980-82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1984

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