Open: Daily 11am-4pm with advance booking
Roche Court
, SP5 1BG, Salisbury, United Kingdom
Open: Daily 11am-4pm with advance booking
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Roche Court , SP5 1BG Matt Rugg: Early and Late Works
Daily 11am-4pm with advance booking
Artist: Matt Rugg
The New Art Centre is delighted to present an exhibition of work by Matt Rugg. Renowned for his incessant experimentation, this exhibition presents early works from the very beginning of Rugg’s career, alongside later works from the 21st century, offering a deep insight into his explorations of form, colour, and material. From painted wooden reliefs, many of which were shown at the New Art Centre on Sloane Street in the 1960s, to recent galvanised steel wire sculptures; the exhibition is complemented by drawings that capture the symbiotic relationship of drawing and sculpture in Rugg’s pictorial practice.
Artworks
Painted wooden construction
410 × 450 × 120 mm
45 x 41 x 12 cm; 17 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 5 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Carved wooden construction
935 × 1010 × 280 mm
101 x 93.5 x 28 cm; 39 3/4 x 36 3/4 x 11 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Painted wooden construction on wooden backboard
1105 × 1110 × 395 mm
111 x 110.5 x 39.5 cm; 43 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Painted wooden construction, with aluminium frame and wooden backboard
920 × 920 × 350 mm
92 x 92 x 35 cm; 36 x 36 x 13 1/2 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Painted wooden relief
610 × 610 × 80 mm
61 x 61 x 8 cm; 24 x 24 x 3 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Painted wooden construction
600 × 535 × 100 mm
53.5 x 60 x 10 cm; 21 x 23 1/2 x 4 in.
Titled, signed and dated on verso
Found galvanised and perforated painted steel, with plastic wire
400 × 345 × 200 mm
34.5 x 40 x 20 cm; 13 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 8 in.
Galvanised steel and wire
330 × 680 × 120 mm
68 x 33 x 12 cm; 26 1/2 x 13 x 4 1/2 in.
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Installation Views
For much of his career, Rugg focused on teaching, having a complete commitment to art education, very much a tenet of the New Art Centre and Roche Court Educational Trust to this day. After graduating from King’s College, University of Durham in Newcastle with First Class Honours in 1961, he was awarded a Hatton Travelling Scholarship, offering an additional year of funding whilst at University, when he visited the Netherlands, Belgium and France, extending his lifelong interest to abstraction. In 1965, Rugg moved to London to the new Chelsea School of Art, initially as part of their Painting School, working alongside Ian Stephenson, John Hoyland and Prunella Clough, among others; before progressing to the Sculpture School when it was run by George Fullard, where he taught with Phyllida Barlow.
In the 1960s, Rugg was included in the Arts Council’s Young Contemporaries, where he was awarded the Arts Council Prize in 1961, showing the new wave of young British artistic talent. Seven painted wooden reliefs from this decade are included in our forthcoming show, exploring Rugg’s initial experiments in two and three dimensions.
A series of suspended sculptures made from twisted wire – titled Anatomies – date from the 21st century and act like colossal drawings in space. Rugg expressed the obsessive winding of the wire as a way that the works ‘make themselves’; and that which Phyllida Barlow describes as: ‘nameless, robust, heavy, but paradoxically elegant and seemingly light... taut with potential energy.’ These works are close to drawing with materials: fleeting yet intrinsic, industrial and tempered.
Drawing, therefore, plays a vital part in Rugg’s work, and this show at the New Art Centre includes a diverse selection: incredibly free drawings, exhilarating in their execution, are shown alongside uncompromisingly solid images, graphic and painterly in their finish. Each drawing – in Conté crayon, oil paint, pastel or mixed media - evokes Rugg’s sculptural language: looped forms protrude from the paper, intense lines appear to contextualise space, and indents of colour heighten their monochrome base.
From September 2023 to January 2024, a full career retrospective will be held at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University. A short documentary film about the radical changes in art education in Newcastle and Chelsea as a context for Rugg’s work will be screened at the retrospective. A monograph to accompany the exhibition is being researched and written by Michael Bird, for publication by Lund Humphries.
