Notes Along the Way: Abstract Art in the 90’s: Kearsey Gold Gallery, London

Notes Along The Way proposes an alternative view of art in 1990s London. Three decades later the work of he media-savvy, hype-driven YBAs looks stuck in its historical moment. We can now look for deeper currents running through the art of the recent past.

Frank Bowling, John Gibbons, Mali Morris and Dillwyn Smith rejected sensationalism and developed an art that emphasises direct visual and physical engagement, and rewards focused contemplation. The painting and sculptures in the exhibition are united in their slowly established, slowly unfurling presence. At their root abstract, they are nevertheless full of evocations of the felt and seen world, its light and space.

By the 90s, modernist abstraction’s moment as a central force within contemporary art had long passed. But modernism’s waning left room for individual modernist voices to flourish, and for feelings old and new to be more fully explored. Art is long, and dedicated artists undo neat periodisation. As Bowling has said: “the possibilities of paint are never-ending.” For all four artists, the 90s was a moment of transition, in which they instigated changes that continue to play out in the work they make today.

The modernist abstraction of the 1960s emphasised relentless formal innovation combined with an ideal of near-instantaneous visuality. On the contrary, the works in Notes Along The Way contain a sense of living timelessness, of physical stillness, that nonetheless subtly registers change. The body is of vital importance to these artists. Perhaps we can say more specifically, the body at rest. These works evoke the body quieted, intensely aware of its internal rhythms and of the space these rhythms exist within.

There are multiple personal and artistic links between these four artists, although they are by no means a unified group. Morris and Bowling were both included in John Hoyland’s Hayward Annual of 1980, that surveyed contemporary British abstract painting. Smith was taught by Morris at Canterbury College of Art. Gibbons, Morris and Smith all attended the Triangle artist workshops in Upstate New York in 1980s; an experience that was especially foundational for Smith’s work in the 1990s. Bowling and Gibbons held parallel solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in 1986; Bowling, Gibbons and Morris developed extensive contacts with American artists, including Melvin Edwards, Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, and with critic Clement Greenberg.

The exhibition’s title comes from an article by Bowling, in which he asserted the importance of London’s artist studios, in Stockwell, Wapping and Greenwich, as a crucial source of the “lively energy that sustains British painting and sculpture, not the market, despite the talk of our living in a market economy.” The relative freedoms of the 90s, although already under pressure, are perhaps hard to imagine today. But we would do well to remember Bowling’s words and that time and space – not the market – allow art to be made.