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Friday 9 January 2009

Shifting combinations

Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour
Until 31 August

Constructed: 40 Years of the UEA Collection
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, until 14 December

The exhibition is downstairs at the Sainsbury Centre, approached down a corridor ramp, one wall of which is hung with a whole sequence of small paintings on unprepared canvas from the 1970s and 80s. These are float-mounted in box-frames so you can see the frayed edges. Roughly geometric in design, they are painted in bright, vibrant colours, the squares, triangles and ellipses dancing down the walls in wedges and spokes of energy. Some are restricted to black and white or grey and white, and explore structure more than colour, others burgeon into orange, purple, green, lilac. They are wonderfully informal and unprecious, the paint spontaneously brushed on (not tidied up later), with the canvas frequently showing through. A particularly enticing example is ‘Multicolour Structure (Version 3)’ from 1981, on orange linen. The viewer is at once transported to the middle of Mellis’s world and propelled forward into the body of the exhibition by its dynamic.

Here we track back in time to 1940 and the early collages — including quite a good one borrowed from the Tate, ‘Sobranie Collage’ (1942). Then, in striking contrast, a group of expressionistic still-lifes appear in which realism is substituted for abstraction, though these assume an increasingly formal rigour of construction until they develop into more abstract boat and sea pictures from 1952–4. These are altogether more assured, a particularly fine example being ‘Boat and Quay at Night’, with its pale carmine quadrant at lower left. According to this exhibition, the 1960s was a fallow time for Mellis, and the tempo only picks up with the hard-edged geometric wall-reliefs of the 1970s, the white ones offering the most scope for admiration. A cabinet of Mellis’s envelope drawings — coloured drawings of flowers on the insides of opened-out envelopes — comes at this point to indicate another rewarding line of enquiry.

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