Mary Martin: The end is always to achieve simplicity
8 January 2005 – 27 February 2005
Mary Martin (1907-1969) was one of the most distinguished and influential of a small group of English constructive artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her geometric paintings, sculptures, reliefs and drawings explore colour, line and form as basic formal elements. This was the first major exhibition of her work in twenty years.
The exhibition explored her personal and distinctive contribution to modern and contemporary British art. It drew together for the first time a selection of her early paintings and traces her move to abstraction. It also included her first reliefs and structures and her later Perspex abstract reliefs.
Married to Kenneth Martin, whose ‘Screw Mobile’ hangs in the house at Kettle’s Yard, this exhibition was an opportunity to view their work together, united by their concern for the unfolding and evolving form. Notions of simplicity and order and the work’s affinities with modern architecture made Mary Martin the perfect artist for Kettle’s Yard.