Anthony Hill - 5 Decades

Anthony Hill (1930-2020) was a seminal figure in British art. He was a founding member and principal theorist of the Constructionists, a group promoting the new post-war abstraction, centred around Victor Pasmore. By the mid-1950s he had abandoned painting for relief construction. Embracing Duchamp's idea of the readymade, Hill used industrial materials such as copper, aluminium and perspex to propose a radical view of structure in art. He featured in the group exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1956, had his first solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in January 1958, and participated in Max Bill's Konkrete Kunst exhibition in Zurich in 1960, exhibiting in survey shows worldwide thereafter. In 1983 he had a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London. In the early 1970s Hill began to push against the dogma surrounding constructivism, starting to make Dada-inspired work alongside the abstract art for which he was well known. An alter ego was born, introduced as Rembrandt Doxford, a name which soon became shortened to Redo (pronounced ray-dough). At first Redo worked in collage, using imagery in ways inspired by John Heartfield and Max Ernst, before moving into three dimensions in the 1980s with constructed works that married the syntax of Hill's reliefs with an array of found and recycled materials. For Hill the idea of an alter ego was rooted in the early part of the twentieth century, influenced by Duchamp with Rrose Selavy, and Van Doesburg with I.K. Bonset. In fact collage and juxtaposition had been a preoccupation of Hill's from the start; as he noted later, 'the Dada streak in A.H. was never exorcised...'.