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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

Of the reliefs, there’s a lovely subtle one called ‘Lilac Lemon Diamond’ (1970), but generally I find the colours of this period harder to take. The main section of the exhibition is then devoted to the driftwood sculptures, most from the 1990s. Among them are such delights as ‘Oceanic’, which seems to have a certain slantwise kinship with Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ series of abstract paintings, and is composed of evocative blues and yellows with touches of red and pink to set them off. Mellis occasionally modified her found driftwood, by washing or painting it, but most of her effects were achieved by chance juxtapositions, and shifting combinations tried over long periods. The four constructions from the 1980s are more obviously illustrative, and two of them ‘Dancing Man’ and ‘Dreaming Woman’ have a post-Cubist, Ceri Richards feel to them. The later ones are more abstract, with rich chromatic variations and a tendency to exploit angles, undersides and unexpected edges. They can get a little too like African fetish figures (bristling with nails), but the best have a remarkable poise and presence.

A 65-minute documentary film about Mellis called A Life in Colour (the exhibition took the same name) has been made by Sue Giovanni and Jules Hussey, with illuminating interviews and much footage of the colourful artist. You can see excerpts from the film on a monitor in the show, and it will soon be available on DVD (£19.99). The exhibition is a survey rather than a retrospective, which allows it to be partial in its coverage of Mellis’s life. Thus there are certain emphases here that a more balanced account of her career might redress. The show certainly makes an argument for the centrality of the late wooden constructions, as if these are Mellis’s supreme artistic legacy. Yet it may be unwise to assume this. I would have liked to see more of the paintings and the early collages. I particularly missed the presence of ‘1st Collage’ and ‘3rd Collage’, from July 1940, both of more interest and originality than the Gabo-derived compositions with ovals included here. There is a clarity and inventiveness of placing in these early collages which seem to prefigure in an unusual way the dispositions of the later constructions. Margaret Mellis’s work offers a rich subject for further elucidation.

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