1960s
In this way ‘Place’ initiated a reformulation of the understanding of pictorial space for the 1960s. Denny continued his exploration of space though the decade, starting with ‘Situation’ in 1960, an exhibition organised as a celebration of the large canvas, for which artists were required to produce entirely abstract work of not less than 30 square feet (2.8 m2). ‘Situation’ (the title referred to ‘the situation in London now’) represented a new professionalism for British artists as well as a synthesis between European and American models. For Denny it opened the period in which he produced ‘some of the most accomplished abstract paintings made in Britain in the twentieth century’ (David Mellor, 2002). During the 1960s he developed a range of work which explores both space and modes of perception. From lines and bands of colour that read as stripes on plain grounds, proposing a space containing a vertical form analogous to the viewer, Denny developed the ‘Out-Line’ group where symmetrical forms are surrounded by a transparent linear structure. With the ‘Lineaments’ this structure became the central, hieratic, almost portal-like focus of the work. In the mid-1960s he introduced oblique lines then, in the ‘Overpaintings’, fragmented structures defiantly at odds with their enclosing squares and rectangles.
In 1969 Denny organised an exhibition for the Arts Council on the American artist Charles Biederman, who for over 20 years worked exclusively on vividly coloured abstract reliefs. This experience coincided with a new intensity of colour in Denny’s work, shifting from rich, dark harmonies to high, bright contrasts, from a sense of twilight to daylight. Formats also changed, notably in the three-dimensional perspex ‘Colour Boxes’ and the ‘Horizontal Paintings’ of the early 1970s which run in a concentrated block across the base of the canvas.
Despite the overall balance and resolution of the 1960s paintings they are inherently contradictory, challenging the viewer’s perceptual expectations. There is neither ‘figure’ nor ‘ground’ but a constant process of visual adjustment; space is thus an ambiguous mental construct rather than a familiar physical quality; colour produces flicker effects and becomes unstable and scale, in works where nothing is certain, is perhaps the greatest conundrum as there is nothing to compare it with. But these perceptual and intellectual dilemmas are what define Denny’s 1960s paintings, marking them as works of rare quality that can stand alongside the best American painting of the period.
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