Vertical Composition No. 2
Artist
Merlyn Evans
(British, 1910 - 1973)
Date1934
MediumTempera on linen mounted on board
DimensionsOverall: 76 3/16 × 49in. (193.5 × 124.5cm)
ClassificationsPAINTINGS
Credit LineGift of John B. and Theta Wolf
Terms
Object number95.14
On View
Not on viewCollections
CopyrightPresumed copyright: the artist or the artist's representative/heir(s).
Label TextMerlyn Oliver Evans, painter and printmaker, was born in Wales but brought up in Glasgow, Scotland. He was deeply affected by the poverty and violence he witnessed in the economically depressed Glasgow of the late 1920s. By 1930 he was finding his way towards a highly individual, sharply angular abstract style. Evans believed that abstraction, so far from being purely aesthetic, was the means to an art actively engaged with life, capable of the most dynamic expression of psychological, ethical and political concerns. His experimental drawings and paintings of the early 1930s combined plant, crustacean and mechanical forms and laid the grounds for the morphological semi-figurative abstraction of his maturity.
In Vertical Composition No. 2 underlying political and psychological themes may be discerned in complex interplay of violently jagged elements and rounded pictorial devices that hint at a disguised figurative form. The painting works visually in terms of what Evans described as "architectural equilibrium, presentational immediacy and directness of optical impact."
Mel Gooding
2005
