John Ernest
John Ernest (born May 6, 1922 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA ; † July 21, 1994 in Exeter , Great Britain ) was an American painter , printmaker and relief artist who spent most of his life in Great Britain. He is considered an important representative of constructivist art and geometric abstraction of the 1950s and 1960s in Great Britain.
life and work
John Ernest studied in Philadelphia and New York City from 1936 to 1941 . He worked as a draftsman in America. In 1946 he moved to England .
When he came to London in 1951 , he saw the group exhibition Abstract Paintings, Sculptures, Mobiles at the AIA Gallery , which impressed him very much. In the same year he began studying at St Martin's School of Art . There he came under the artistic influence of Victor Pasmore and other representatives of constructivism.
In the 1950s he associated with artists such as Anthony Hill , Kenneth Martin , Mary Martin , Stephen Gilbert and Gillian Wise and became himself an important member of the British constructivist art movement. From 1954 he used machine-made materials (such as metals : steel or aluminum ) for his art. From 1956 he was a teacher at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham .
John Ernest created reliefs and free-standing sculptural constructions. Some of his works are part of the collection of the Tate Gallery in London. In 1961 he designed a tower and a large wall relief for the Congress of the Union Internationale des Architectes , South Bank in London . He had his first solo exhibition in July 1964 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In 1968 he participated in the 4th documenta in Kassel with four colored metal reliefs .
Ernest was known for his precise and careful work. Symmetry and asymmetry were essential elements of his reliefs. He used applied mathematics and geometry in his compositions, but kept the underlying theories simple, much like Pasmore and Hill. John Ernest had a lifelong fascination with mathematics, together with his colleague Anthony Hill, for example, he made contributions to graph theory .
literature
- Exhibition catalog for the IV. Documenta: IV. Documenta. International exhibition ; Catalog: Volume 1: (Painting and Sculpture); Volume 2: (Graphics / Objects); Kassel 1968
- Kimpel, Harald / Stengel, Karin: documenta IV 1968 International Exhibition - A Photographic Reconstruction (series of publications from the documenta archive); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ernest, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter, printmaker, and relief artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 6, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 21, 1994 |
| Place of death | Exeter , UK |