Lot 178: Transformable Relief with Circles

Peter Lowe (b. 1938)
Transformable Relief with Circles
signed and dated 'PETER LOWE/1960' (on the reverse)
painted wood
24¼ x 48 in. (61 x 121.9 cm.)

London, Drian Galleries, Peter Lowe Reliefs , August 1962.
London, Drian Galleries, 6 English Painters , 1963.
London, Artists' International Association, + - (plus minus) , 1963. London, Artists' International Association, The Geometric Environment; with works by Peter Lowe, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin & Others , 1963.
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Construction England , April 1963: this exhibition travelled to Hull, Ferens Art Gallery.
Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, Exhibition by Staff from Leeds College of Art, 1964.
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Unit Series Progression , January - February 1967: this exhibition toured to Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery.

PETER LOWE

Peter Lowe (b. London 1938) has been making constructed abstract art since 1960. He trained at Goldsmiths College where he was taught by Kenneth and Mary Martin, two of the leading pioneers of this kind of art and he was strongly influenced by them, though his own work is very individual.

Constructed abstract art is not abstracted from the appearance of nature but is built up with basic geometric forms ordered systematically into harmonious rhythms. While its roots lie in the foundation abstract art movements of around the time of the First World War, it was most strongly developed in this country after the Second War by the Martins, Victor Pasmore, Anthony Hill and John Ernest. Throughout this long development the medium of the constructed relief has been important and it is here that Lowe has perhaps made his most distinctive contribution.

Lowe showed his early constructed reliefs from 1962 (see lots 178, 179) in a number of important exhibitions including The Geometric Environment at the Artists' International Association and Construction England toured by the Arts Council. He has been exhibiting regularly and extensively since, though it is noteworthy that the majority of his exhibitions and accompanying publications have been in Continental Europe where the tradition of Constructivism is more established than in this country. He is represented in major Continental collections such as Grenoble Museum and that formed by Peter Ruppert in W/uurzburg. In 1969 he took part in the exhibition Systeemi System in Helsinki which led to the formation of the British group Systems. Besides Lowe, this group included Jeffrey Steele, Malcolm Hughes, Jean Spencer, Michael Kidner, Gillian Wise, John Ernest and others. In the first half of the '70s they held several group and individual exhibitions, notably Systems in 1972 at the Whitechapel Gallery. Today, after decades of neglect in this country, the group is subject to keen interest with exhibitions at commercial galleries in London and at the Southampton City Art Gallery (until 31st March).

Lowe's art is systematic. He will take a basic shape and move it through predetermined sequences that grow logically, yet often surprisingly, into spiralling formations (see lot 182). In 1974 he started his series of Volume and Void reliefs in which squares are removed systematically from the base plane and stacked in developing sequence. These reliefs are unified by neutral, homogeneous materials and finishes that concentrate attention on the order of their forms. Lowe himself has remarked: 'The individual act of invention is not in the forms themselves but in the particular ordering of them' (see Exhibition catalogue, Systems , London, Arts Council, 1972-3, p. 35). Lot 181, which was exhibited at the Annely Juda Gallery in 1980, is a formative work in this series.

Scale is important. Though Lowe has made large, ground based works, most of his reliefs are of a modest, domestic scale. They are reassuring objects to live with, beautifully made, precisely ordered, accessible and constantly intriguing.

Alastair Grieve


Transformable Relief with Circles is an early version of a small series of seven works involving circles (three are now destroyed). The work is based on the idea of rotation of a moving format, linking it to collage, kinetic art and, indirectly, to cubism. The artist intended that random and infinite transformations would be made by public intervention. The relief epitomises the artist's theoretical interest in forming processes in nature and technology. The second version was sold to the then Director of Temple Newsome House in 1964.
'Lowe and (Colin) Jones ... differ from earlier English Constructionism in that ... their use of material, expresses to a far greater degree, volume and mass ... there is a definite increase of interest in the problem of the spatiality of the relief' (see Exhibition catalogue, Exhibition of Relief Structures , July - August 1966).