Victor Pasmore

Victor Pasmore is one of the leading exponents of English constructivist abstraction. He was born in 1908 in Chelsham, Surrey. He moved to London in 1926 where, from 1927 to 1932, he attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he developed a knowledge of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Later, he also approached Fauvism, Cubism and Abstractionism. In 1932 he organised his first exhibition, which took place at the Cooling Gallery in London. Together with other artists, he founded the Neo-Impressionist group of Euston Road, which, however, was always linked to an Impressionist style, to an art that did not look at modernity. He looked at artists such as Whistler, Walter Sickert, Condor or Chardin and the pointillism of Seurat. At the end of the 1940s he moved towards abstractionism and collage. His art becomes a synthesis of reality reduced to dots and lines. He then seeks relief in the works and does so using different materials, such as Plexiglas. At this stage he only uses black and white, but soon returns to colour, representing superimposed geometric shapes.  In 1959 he approached a typical Bauhaus style of teaching and began to study architecture. In the 1970s, he returned to a more painterly technique, in which heavy forms were linked together. In the last years of his career he demonstrated his adherence to the modern abstract style. In 1966 he moved to Malta where he died in 1998.