Victor Pasmore's move to Abstraction in 1948 was described by the Modernist art historian Herbert Read as 'the most revolutionary event in post 1945 British art'. Pasmore began his career as a Post-Impressionist, creating subtle tonal studies of the landscape and dream-like portraits of his wife, the artist Wendy Blood. He had worked as a clerk at London County Council, making art in his spare time until the director of the National Gallery Sir Kenneth Clark offered to support him financially in 1938, enabling the artist to concentrate fully on his art. Pasmore taught art throughout his life, starting with the Euston Road School which he formed with William Coldstream promoting a style of English Impressionism. The war halted this and Pasmore registered as a conscientious objector but was forced into the Army, then prison until 1942.

By the late1940s Pasmore was finding Impressionism a dead end. He turned his studio into 'a kind of research laboratory' abandoning his paintbrush to get away from 'illusionistic associations and [I] adopted the paper collage technique of early Cubism in which the painting was brought forward from the picture-plane'. He experimented with reliefs and crossed the divide separating 2- and 3-dimensional art into Constructivism. The use of Perspex was a means to make a 2-dimensional object project into space independently but in a non-illusionistic way. Construction looks back to Piet Mondrian but also anticipates installation art, expanding the form into the space of the viewer. It also anticipates his only truly three-dimensional work, the Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, Durham. Standing at the end of a lake, it functions as a bridge. Strongly influenced by his painting and reliefs, the Pavilion shows a series of interlocking shapes cast in concrete. As well as expressing his Constructivist ideas it is also an exercise in Brutalist architecture.

Click here for further information on the Apollo Pavilion.