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
In the ground-floor gallery is a selection from UEA’s extensive collection of abstract and constructivist art, developed in response to architect Denys Lasdun’s concrete campus, and focusing on the ordered and rational environment many thought appropriate to the modern world. Thus we have a room kitted out with Isokon furniture with a couple of Cecil Stephenson drawings on the walls, Marcel Breuer’s plywood Long Chair centre stage, and a sumptuous copper-covered electric fire by Wells Coates to the rear. There’s also a lovely Adrian Heath abstract, entitled ‘Growth of Forms’ (1951). Elsewhere, chairs play a major role in this display, with examples by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveldt, Eames, Tatlin and El Lissitsky. There is also a wealth of classic constructivist art — Victor Pasmore, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Gillian Wise-Ciobotaru — as well as less obvious things by Bomberg, Ozenfant and Paule Vezelay. Next to Vezelay’s ‘Three Forms on Pink and Brown’ (1936) is Margaret Mellis’s ‘Transparent Construction’ (1940), thus positioning her usefully in a wider context. Look out for Alan Reynolds’s exquisitely subtle drawing ‘Modular Study 70B’ and the painted aluminium boxes of Stephen Gilbert. The show peters out on the wilder and more arid shores of constructivism where nothing grows among the bleached squares and aluminium flaps, but you might find a small, burnt object by Roger Ackling.
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