Untitled No. 97 Paul Huxley

Huxley demonstrates the emergence of the Post-Pop generation with his abstract pictures earning first prize at the legendary The New Generation exhibition in 1964. The simplified, crystallized visual world of the simplest geometrical elements possible became decisive in his painting for some twenty years. He conjured up elegant and sophisticated structures by grouping, mostly diagonally, the linked-up elements on a homogeneous background. The canvas, for Huxley, is the theatre of pictorial events where forms, masses, colours seek some balance in the surrounding void.
“The chain of shapes reading from the upper corner, the strong tonal difference between the colours; both devices, especially when used on a bigger scale, delay the overall effect of the picture. … My attitude then to yellow was that it was too immediate and garish to use; later, that it was probably the most difficult and so I became preoccupied with it: eventually I used it for a whole series of paintings. This coincided in time with my living for a while in New York where, I realize now in retrospect, I was affected by certain brilliant yellows I saw in the streets near my studio.”
From the ’80s, he continued his experiments in picture fields divided in the middle, allowing for a dialogue between the two sides in slacker and freer forms. Two gouache studies from this period preserved in the collection indicate the tendency of change.

Ferenc Tóth