Systems Art - Hughes and Steele

Systems art


The ideas within Systems Art in terms of the Systems Group, founded by Malcolm Hughes and Jeffrey Steele in around 1970, were mainly evoked through painting. 

"Malcolm Hughes was born in 1920 in Manchester. He studied art in Manchester at the Regional College of Art and at the Royal College of Art. During his 30s he was influenced by British abstract artists, but by the early 1960s he began to develop his own Constructivist practice. This type of art first developed in Russia at the start of the twentieth century, and was to become a truly international art form over the following decades. It does not seek to represent what can be seen in the visual world, but to construct works from standard elements and rules. It is a rational art that offers both formal and surprisingly sensual results.

In 1969 Hughes co-founded the Systems Group with Jeffrey Steele." http://www.malcolmhughesartist.eu/biography.html

Malcolm Hughes

Jeffrey Steele

Quotes from 'Towards a Rational Aesthetic: Constructive Art in Post-war Britain'

(on Constructivism)

The concept of the non-figurative abstract art work as not

representing or symbolising anything external to itself.

• The key principle of the art work being constructed or built up

from a vocabulary of generally geometric elements, based on

some form of underlying system or structure.

• The work standing for itself, not as an expression of the artist’s

personality.

• An affinity, in terms of its rationality and structural principles,

with science and technology.

• Hard-edged imagery, an absence of illusionistic perspective or

chiaroscuro, and the concept of space as a compositional

element.

• The use of non-traditional and often industrial materials,

particularly in constructed abstract reliefs.

"[Anthony Hill ] described the relationship between art and mathematics in his work in these terms: “The mathematical thematic can only be a component: one is organising something which is itself an object of achievement which is clearly not mathematical,” Put another way, Hill has always been concerned with creating what the critic Andrew Wilson has described as “visual objects which act directly on our senses and in which mathematical structures  generate visually satisfying qualities of rhythm, balance and interaction.” Or as Alastair Grieve has written, in an explanation which can be applied to all the artists in this exhibition: “Judgement by eye was always of paramount importance to him, and mathematical systems were only starting points or tools used in the creation of a harmonious object.”"