When the curtain falls and night envelops the passing day.

When silence calls and burning passion lulls to sleep.

When the star is fixed and reason dreams, then the heart is free

And I alone with Thee.

— Victor Pasmore

The Directors of Marlborough are pleased to present Victor Pasmore: Prints, an exhibition which will highlight the graphic work of the British artist who played a key role in the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition, which will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at Marlborough New York in over two decades, will open on Thursday, March 10, 2022, and will remain on view through Saturday, April 30, 2022. 

Beginning in the 1947, the figurative painter Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) veered towards pure abstraction, anticipating this dramatic shift in twentieth-century art. Though his earliest interrogations of abstraction were categorized by the utilization of linear forms and collage, in 1952, Pasmore, drawing upon constructivist ideologies, fashioned works as three-dimensional wall-reliefs in wood and Perspex. In the 1960s the geometry softened, introducing curved lines and edges, and bright colors blossoming in the 1970s and later into lyrical abstract compositions of points, wandering lines and planes of bright colors against his habitual white backgrounds and even some drawn outlines of natural forms again towards the end of his life.

This exhibition will present Pasmore’s graphic works, which the artist began developing during the renaissance of printmaking in the 1960s up until his death in 1998. The prints are categorized as a synthetization of mathematics and geometrical forms, often juxtaposed with poetry written by Pasmore. The printmaking process served as a collaboration between Pasmore and the printer, with the artist drawing on the studio’s particular skills and developing images in conjunction with them.

Retrospective exhibitions of Pasmore’s work were held in at the ICA, the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, and he represented Britain at the 30th Venice Biennale in 1960, with an exhibition that toured to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Bochum, Belgrade, Oslo and Copenhagen. In 1964 he was awarded the Carnegie Prize. He represented Britain again at the 8th Sao Paulo Biennial in 1965, toured to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago, in the same year as his retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. Museum and gallery exhibitions proliferated across Europe and the USA, culminating in retrospectives at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. and the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York and the Serpentine Gallery, London. In 2016, Victor Pasmore Towards a New Reality opened to critical acclaim at Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham, United Kingdom. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the Deutsche Bank Collection and the Tate Gallery in London.