Mystery and dizzying luxuriance at Warwick Arts Centre exhibition

MEANING and allusion were of primary importance for the sculptor, Hubert Dalwood, practising in the 1960s and 70s. It didn’t always follow that structure therefore went out of the window. It was more a case of its not being allowed to dominate.

The roots of Dalwood’s approach run deep. There are chunky figures here whose look is positively prehistoric. They stand in opposition to the tendency of the day where purely abstract form and space were the bread and butter of the sculptors that took their cue from Anthony Caro.

Even at his most abstract, Dalwood was attempting to represent something that he felt was more profound, beyond the purely formal characteristics of structure. His polished aluminium reliefs or ‘Places’ of the 60s and 70s have the appearance of deadly serious quasi-architectural models - portentously capable of chilling the soul if they had ever been built on a massive scale. As it is, Cloudy Tower and Second Place (pictured) glitter mysteriously and luxuriantly under the gallery lights, easily fulfilling his ambition to ‘reinstate the primacy of the imagination.’

Equally ambitious but in a more playful manner, the pioneering work of Anni Albers in the adjoining gallery explores the as then unexplored potential of geometric abstraction in textile design. There are some wonderful examples here of dizzying luxuriance that is sumptuous in a 1930s ‘Wallcovering’ and sensuous in a set of mischievously curvilinear prints.

She lived in the shadow of her more famous husband, Joseph, whose colour experiments set the benchmark for 20th century abstract painting, but she was clearly more adventurous and probably much more fun.

Peter McCarthy