Go Five

As one of the leading avant-garde artists in the 1950s, Robyn Denny helped propel British art into the international mainstream. In 1957 he graduated from the Royal College of Art, which by then had established itself as the country's epicentre for creative thinking in the visual arts. Denny and fellow students like Richard Smith and Peter Blake produced work that expressed an urban vitality which was cool and raw in contrast to the lyrical charm portrayed by the abstracted landscapes of the St Ives School.

Go Five is an important and extremely rare early work made by Denny, shortly after his graduation. Like the artist's other collage paintings from this period, the present work draws its inspiration from the city itself: the street signs, billboards, advertisements and graffiti. In his RCA thesis, Language, Symbol, Image, he noted, 'some walls have been decorated in this way so frequently that the message has been obliterated, layer upon layer carrying the conflicting symbols of passing generations, and finally expressing defiance by saying nothing' (artist's archive, no. 1, pages unnumbered).

In 1973, Denny became the youngest living artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. In his catalogue introduction to that exhibition, Robert Kudielka refers to these early works as crucial to Denny's later development - where the artist was 'transmuted into the master of minimal nuances, of subtle tones and shifts' (see R. Kudielka, Robyn Denny, London, Tate Gallery Exhibition, 1973, p. 15).