BOB LAW

(1934-2004)

Nothing to be Afraid of V 16.7.69
1969

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, UK (gift from the artist)
Thence by descent to the present owner




Amongst a generation of Minimalist painters who emerged in the 1960s, there are few global representatives of the chiefly American movement that defined the defiant ethos and formal pursuits like the British artist Bob Law. His canvases were a firm rebuff to the paint-laden, intensely 'expressed' abstract works that had been de rigueur for European and American Modernism in the mid-century. Presented here, Nothing to be Afraid of V 16.7.69 is a definitive work of the Minimalist genre, yet it goes further than this, marking one of the most earnest breaks from the painterly canon that blurs the boundaries between material and conceptual artwork.

Law was a self-taught and independent spirit amongst British painters. Associated at one time with Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon in Cornwall's avant-gardist nerve centre, Law took his cues as much from the searing open colour fields of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as his compatriots. He was an artist who was immensely ahead of his time, developing an awareness of painterly problems that demonstrate his ambition and radical concepts that were truly breakthrough. The Nothing to be Afraid of series was one of Law's earliest and most cunning projects, initiated in the early 1960s, prior to his seminal Black paintings that followed. Creating an interior frame that was carefully rendered askew to offset the subtly irregular shape of the stretcher, Law produced a painting that in its outrageous simplicity was constantly on the verge of visual collapse. Drawing the spectators' eye into the centre of the field, containing the 'nothing' that Law makes his subject matter, the artist drives home his controversial conceptual point: is art; is painting; is nothing; something to be afraid of? The titular puzzle that Law poses is just one facet of the present work's complexity and charm. Whilst cool American Minimalism rebelled against its wounded forefathers in the most extreme black and white terms, Law opens up space for wit, for debate, and for development. It is an ambitious vision of art practice, but one that Law is arguably the outright and leading champion for that is captured no better than in this definitive example.

A painting that was gifted to a close friend and patron of the artist who supported him until his death, it is comes to market now as one of the most complex and rare pieces of British post-war painting to be offered in recent years.