Pasmore visited Ben Nicholson in St Ives in 1950, and soon afterwards followed Nicholson's example in making relief paintings. These reliefs relate to his work with architects and town-planners (he was a consultant architectural designer for the new town of Peterlee from 1955-77). Here, Pasmore takes painting into real, three-dimensional space and conceives the frame - and the space beyond it - as an integral part of the work.
Victor Pasmore (English, 1908 - 1998)
Although largely self-taught as an artist, Pasmore was a key figure in British art. He exhibited with the London Group from 1931 and it was around then that he first flirted with abstraction. Yet he swiftly destroyed his early experimentations and instead gained recognition as a naturalistic painter. However, in 1948 his work underwent a dramatic shift towards abstraction and in 1951 he controversially declared that easel painting was dead. Pasmore helped found the Euston Road School in 1937 and his passion for teaching continued with posts at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, Central School and King?s College, University of Durham. He continued to experiment artistically throughout his career, returning to a more figurative mode of painting in the 1990s.
