Matt Connors: Finding Aid features Bob Law's 'Nothing to be Afraid of I 16.7.69' (1969), a definitive work of the Minimalist genre: one of the most complex and rare pieces of British post-war painting and the first ever made in his iconic series. 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.
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.
On view between 8 March - 2 June 2024.
