For this week’s #Brigincolour we are focussing on Peziza by Jeffrey Steele which was added to the Art Collection in 1974. Jeffrey Steele (born 3rd July 1931) is an abstract painter. He grew up in Cardiff, Wales, and studied at local art schools.
During the 1950s he experimented with representational styles. In Paris in 1959 he encountered the work of geometric abstractionists such as Victor Vasarely and Max Bill, and adopted a lifelong abstract approach.
Jeffrey Steele’s work in the 1960s was two-dimensional and two-tonal, and explored the idea of space and how we conceive space. For eight years he worked only in black and white and was associated with the Op art movement.
Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions. Op art works are abstract, with many better known pieces created in black and white. Typically, they give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibrating patterns, or of swelling or warping.
The Art Collection’s Peziza was created in 1965 and Jeffrey explained his work as ‘visual black and white impressions based upon a series of lines of length which increase in mathematical progression’. He was interested not only in the creation of a sense of space within artworks, but was also interested in how an audience responds to art and the way in which they move in the space around an artwork in order to gain different perspectives.
This artwork currently hangs in the A-B Corridor in the Pathfoot Building, In our collections we also have another work by Steele Syntagma SG13 which was added to the collection a year earlier in 1973.
