Anthony Hill Biography

Anthony Hill was born in London in 1930. He studied art at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Art between 1948-51. As a student he worked primarily as a painter and was interested in Dada and Surrealism. He shifted his focus somewhat in 1950 when he began experimenting with collage.

In 1951 Hill, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Victor Pasmore, and Robert Adams began actively forming a group through which they could promote their common interest in Constructivism.

Constructivism originated in Russia and sought to align art more fully with industrialization through geometric abstraction. Though the English Constructionists never were a group in the formal sense of the word, they did exhibit together, influence and support each other, as well as publish their own publications, like Broadsheet for example.

1951 was also significant for Hill because he began exchanging letters with Marcel Duchamp, Max Bill and Charles Biederman. Though Hill began his artistic career looking to Miro, Klee, Nicholson and the Cubists, these new correspondents were to become strong influences for the artist

In 1953 Hill abandoned color and worked exclusively in black and white. Many of the Constructionists group within which Hill was working had already done the same in an effort to escape decoration and to make their work more precise, ordered and mechanical. His works by this time had become streamlined and minimalist, and often featured a composition of black geometric shapes on a white background.

Hill continued to work in paint until 1956, at which point he began experimenting with relief. Transparent and opaque plastic sheet, rubberized cloth, tape, silver grey and black anodized aluminum, and other materials appear on his canvases. In 1957 he actually gave up painting all together and dedicated himself to his relief works. By 1959 copper sheet, brass angle, zinc and stainless steel appear. These early relief works are composed of right angles and have strong vertical and horizontal emphasis.

In 1961 Hill organized Construction: England: 1950-60 at the Drain Gallery. This was to be the last group exhibition of the London Constructionists. The group members had achieved all they could together and no longer needed to depend on one another the way they once had.

By the beginning of the 1960s Hill had generated a strong interest in mathematics and made more conscious efforts to incorporate mathematical values into his art. Though his mathematical research took up an increasing amount of time during this decade, it was also a time of great artistic success for Hill.

He exhibited in several major group exhibitions, had three solo shows, and contributed articles to important journals and publications. In addition, the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Stuyvesant Foundation, the Kroller Muller Museum and a number of private collectors all purchased Hill works, and he edited the anthology Directions in Art, Theory, and Aesthetics (DATA).

In 1970 Hill made the first of his Co-structures, a series of freestanding geometric construction made from various materials. In the 1980s Anthony Hill created a pseudonym, Achill Redo, under which he returned to his student interest in Dada and surrealism and created collage works that would otherwise have been seen as a major departure. The Tate Gallery keeps Anthony Hill and Achill Redo separate in their archives.