Bob Law: Field Works 1959–1999

During Law’s stay at St Ives in the late 1950s, the artist developed a series of Field drawings that reduced elements observed in the surrounding landscape – the sun, trees and clouds – into a set of abstract signs held within a rhomboid frame. The series was, in Law’s words, ‘about the position of myself on the face of the earth and the environmental conditions around me’. Using a thickly drawn line to contain and delimit the almost-blank pictorial field, Law refined his early abstract language in subsequent monochrome works, from ‘open’ and ‘closed’ drawings to the monumental paintings of the Mister Paranoia series. Published to accompany a 2015 exhibition of the same name, this volume draws together over 20 works by leading British minimalist Bob Law (1934–2004), providing a concise overview of the artist’s career. This fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by Douglas Fogle that includes new scholarship on the artist and focuses on his pursuit of the void’s poetic possibilities.