Michael Bolus

Michael Bolus b. 1934

T01359 Untitled 1971

Not inscribed.
Painted aluminium and steel, 67 x 269¾ x 40 (170.5 x 685 x 101.5).
Presented by Alistair McAlpine 1971.
Exh: Waddington Galleries II, March 1971; The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery, June-August 1971 (21, repr.).
Lit: Richard Morphet, in catalogue of The Alistair McAlpine Gift, 1971, p. 62.

In Bolus’s newest work, represented here by ‘Untitled’, 1971, the lattice structure hinted at in ‘8th Sculpture’, 1963, in the topological box sculptures of 1965, and in the linear criss-cross and apertures of ‘5th Sculpture’, 1966, is constructed from straight strips of aluminium, curved in section, which recall the half-cylinders seen in ‘ ist Sculpture’, 1967–8. It embodies the sense of potential telescoping seen in the colour-plane works of 1970, and the sense of being a fragment of a larger whole seen in those and so many other works. Through and along this open wall run two long slender rods, again expressing continuity- through fragmentation. The glinting silver-painted material catches the light in random ways. In this open screen of non-colour hanging in space, plane is alternately questioned and defined. Strongly suggestive of a utilitarian purpose and standing very immediately in the spectator’s own space, it implies a growing freedom in Bolus’s choice and deployment of materials and in his means of giving physical form to spontaneous feeling.

Published in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972, London 1972.