Acrylic sheet, aluminium and hardboard
Tate Collection
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<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wise-2156" aria-label="More by Gillian Wise" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Gillian Wise</a>
Relief Construction
Lent from the collection of Sonya and David Newell-Smith 2019
<p><span>Relief Construction</span> 1964 is a relief constructed out of plastic and aluminium that presents a play of transparent, coloured and reflective surfaces set off against a horizontally rectangular ground. Like many of Wise’s reliefs dating from between 1962 and 1965, the rectangular base of this relief is divided in half – both halves offering variations on the theme of the square and the materials used. Here the left half consists of a stack of square sheets. On a base square of transparent acrylic sheet are three squares of an equal but smaller size – a red acrylic sheet fixed to the transparent base and, projecting from this, a blue acrylic sheet, and from that a polished aluminium sheet. On the right half, a white acrylic sheet acts as the base square (mirroring the transparent sheet on the left side) onto which is applied a reflective aluminium square the same size as the stacked squares on the opposite side. On the left side of this projects a square outline made of blue acrylic sheeting, and on the right is a similar projection fabricated from red acrylic sheeting beneath which, and affixed directly to the aluminium, is a second red square shape. Flush with the bottom edge of this square, and to its left, a transparent acrylic square slants upwards and is affixed to the outer edge of the blue square. Echoing this, another transparent square slants upward from the outer edge of the projecting red square to the top edge of the aluminium base square.</p>
relief acrylic sheet aluminium hardboard
Relief Construction
object: 608 × 916 × 160 mm
Lent from the collection of Sonya and David Newell-Smith 2019
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<p>
<i>Relief Construction</i> 1964 is a relief constructed out of plastic and aluminium that presents a play of transparent, coloured and reflective surfaces set off against a horizontally rectangular ground. Like many of Wise’s reliefs dating from between 1962 and 1965, the rectangular base of this relief is divided in half – both halves offering variations on the theme of the square and the materials used. Here the left half consists of a stack of square sheets. On a base square of transparent acrylic sheet are three squares of an equal but smaller size – a red acrylic sheet fixed to the transparent base and, projecting from this, a blue acrylic sheet, and from that a polished aluminium sheet. On the right half, a white acrylic sheet acts as the base square (mirroring the transparent sheet on the left side) onto which is applied a reflective aluminium square the same size as the stacked squares on the opposite side. On the left side of this projects a square outline made of blue acrylic sheeting, and on the right is a similar projection fabricated from red acrylic sheeting beneath which, and affixed directly to the aluminium, is a second red square shape. Flush with the bottom edge of this square, and to its left, a transparent acrylic square slants upwards and is affixed to the outer edge of the blue square. Echoing this, another transparent square slants upward from the outer edge of the projecting red square to the top edge of the aluminium base square. </p>
<p>The theme of successive coloured, reflective and transparent planes in the left half of the relief is extended in the right half into three-dimensional linear drawing – a subject that would concern Wise into the 1970s, realised for example in the linear illusion of three-dimensionality in her painting <i>Looped Network Suspended in Pictorial Space </i>1974 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wise-looped-network-suspended-in-pictorial-space-t01965" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T01965</span></a>) which manipulates plane, point and line. Like fellow constructionist Anthony Hill (born 1930), Wise was keen to exploit industrially fabricated materials as found – and of all the British constructionists she also employed a wider range of colour and materials to exploit a greater play of light on different types of surface. In 1986 she published photographs of views of her studio taken in 1964–5 with an array of reliefs, including <i>Relief Construction</i>, on the walls in different light conditions; in another shot her face is reflected in the upper aluminium sheet on the left half of this work (Gillian Wise, <i>Report for the Graham Foundation: Anchorage and Modulations: 2, Light and Form/Still Lives</i>, Chicago 1986, plates 13 and 17).  </p>
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<i>Relief Construction </i>was formerly owned by Sonya and David Newell-Smith, founders and directors of the Tadema Gallery in London, whose personal collection of twentieth-century abstract art focused particularly on artists working within the traditions and legacies of constructivism.</p>
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<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Alastair Grieve, <i>Constructed Abstract Art in England, A Neglected Avant-garde</i>, London 2005.<br/>Gillian Wise, <i>20 Small Works &amp; the Alice Walls at the Barbican</i>, Toulouse 2011.</p>
<p>Andrew Wilson<br/>December 2018</p>
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Summary
2021-12-22T00:00:00
summary
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