Abstract painter and sculptor Kenneth Martin was a pioneer of Constructivist Art in the U.K. After working in Realist portraits and landscapes for almost two decades, Martin turned toward abstraction, painting purely non-representational works that explored spatial relationships between intersecting and overlapping geometric figures. He drew extensive influence from Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Calder, channeling the latter in his mobile sculptures—composed of simple structural elements—with which he explored laws of tension, gravity, balance, and torque. In his “Chance and Order” series (1971), Martin set up grids on paper and numbered the points of intersection. Corresponding numbers were drawn out of a hat in pairs, which he then translated into lines on the grid. The resulting paintings are both abstract works and yet highly concrete, transparent documents of his artistic process.
Abstract painter and sculptor Kenneth Martin was a pioneer of Constructivist Art in the U.K. After working in Realist portraits and landscapes for almost two decades, Martin turned toward abstraction, painting purely non-representational works that explored spatial relationships between intersecting and overlapping geometric figures. He drew extensive influence from Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Calder, channeling the latter in his mobile sculptures—composed of simple structural elements—with which he explored laws of tension, gravity, balance, and torque. In his “Chance and Order” series (1971), Martin set up grids on paper and numbered the points of intersection. Corresponding numbers were drawn out of a hat in pairs, which he then translated into lines on the grid. The resulting paintings are both abstract works and yet highly concrete, transparent documents of his artistic process.