British Abstract Painting in the Eighties

Lanchester Research Gallery & Herbert Museum and Gallery

In the 1980s there was a resurgence of interest in painting across Europe and America. In Britain, the decade was dominated by a break from modernist abstraction, growing interest in figuration and the adoption of neo-expressionist approaches, all of which seemed to have the effect of revitalising painting. This exhibition and conference, aimed to reconsider the energy and creativity that characterized abstract painting in Britain during the decade.

Writing in the 1980s, painter Sean Scully reflected that ‘the point is to rediscover for yourself the dynamic and real reason for making abstract art’. The painters in this exhibition individually examined different ways to rediscover and renew abstract painting in a period when abstract painting was considered in the mainstream to be a recidivist activity. Their work illustrates that the exploration of the territory of form was still a rich area for inquiry.

At the beginning of the 1980s, art critics, such as Tim Hilton and Christos Joachimides, felt that a change in attitude took place in London that opened up the possibilities of what painting could be. Artists, who had been engaged in abstract painting during the 1970s, became aware of this change and looked for new ground to break. Hilton, in A Force against the Basilisk (1980), gave examples of several young abstract painters, including Clyde Hopkins, Jeff Dellow and Geoffrey Rigden, who he felt were suddenly exploring new unexpected facets of painting in a way he had not imagined possible, three or four years earlier. To understand the conditions that led to this development within painting, it is necessary to examine the events and changes that occurred in relation to abstraction in the preceding decades.