Robyn Denny

Edward Maurice FitzGerald Robyn Denny (Abinger, Surrey, 1930 – France, 2014) was one of a group of young artists who transformed British painting in the late 1950s and brought it into the international mainstream. Reacting against the landscape painting of the St Ives School, they looked to Abstract Expressionism, American films, popular culture and urban life, and saw abstraction as their only viable path.

Denny studied at St Martin's School of Art (1951-1954) and the Royal College of Art (1954-1957), and after graduating he won a scholarship to study in Italy. His early Royal College works mixed rudimentary heads, indebted to French Tachisme, with abstract collages and large gestural canvases close to American Abstract Expressionism. In 1969 he organised an exhibition on the American artist Charles Biederman, a period that coincided with a shift towards brighter colour and sharper contrasts.

In 1981 he moved to Los Angeles, returning to London in 1986. His painting changed radically there: over large acrylic monochromes, clusters of scratched marks rest on a thin horizontal line, built up from as many as thirty layers of pigment. His best-known public work, a set of coloured lines installed at Embankment tube station in London in 1985, is also among the least noticed.

Denny took part in landmark shows such as Place (1959) and Situation (1960), and in the Venice Biennale of 1966. His legacy lies in helping to bring British abstraction into the international circuit.