Gillian Wise

Life

Wise was born in London, and studied art at the Wimbledon and Central schools of art. In the 1950s she became the youngest member of the Constructionist group, centred on Victor Pasmore and included Adrian Heath, John Ernest, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin, and Mary Martin. She exhibited in the 1957 Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Royal British Artists gallery and in the New Vision Centre's abstract show in 1958. In the 1960s her work became much more widely shown with exhibitions in London (at the Drian, Axiom, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Victoria and Albert Museum galleries), in Chicago, and at the 1965 Tokyo Biennale and the 1969 Nuremberg Biennale. In 1968 she gained a UNESCO Fellowship award to study in Prague, followed in 1969 by a British Council scholarship to study Russian constructivism in Leningrad. In the same year she exhibited with a group of British artists in an exhibition of systems-based abstraction in Finland, followed in 1970 by her joining many of the same artists in the newly founded Systems Group. Her fellow artists in that group included Jeffrey Steele, Peter Lowe, Malcolm Hughes, Jean Spencer, Michael Kidner, John Ernest, and David Saunders. She exhibited with the group in Matrix at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1970, and then in 1972 at the Whitechapel Gallery in the Arts Council's Systems exhibition. The Arts Council also commissioned her to curate the Constructivist section of the 1978 Hayward Annual, followed in the same year by her inclusion in the Arts Council's Constructive Context show.

She taught at the Chelsea and St Martins schools of Art between 1971 and 1974, and later spent several years teaching and studying in the USA after being elected in 1981 as a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also had appointment as Visiting Artist and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and the University of California. While in the USA she was twice nominated in the UK as an RA, her nominees including the architects Ernő Goldfinger, Richard Rogers, and Hugh Casson, together, among others, with the artists Sandra Blow, William Scott, and Peter Blake. Her absence in the USA and later Paris prevented her election but the range and status of her nominees is evidence of the high regard for the quality and integrity of her work held by many leading artists and architects. Early in the 1980s she was commissioned by the architects of the Barbican Centre in London to design the large-scale mural construction in the stairwell to the main cinema. This work incorporates mirrors — a feature along with glass prisms which she has used in a number of her reliefs as a way of introducing effects of light which add to the perceptual interest of the abstract imagery.

Living in France for much of her later career, her exhibitions in the UK became infrequent in the 1990s although she was shown several times in Paris during this decade and, in 1995, in Chicago. In the 2000s her work has been included in group exhibitions in the Osborne Samuel and Poussin galleries in London, at the British Art Fair, and in two exhibitions of British abstract and systems-based art at the Southampton City Art Gallery. In 2010 her work was included along with that of Victor Pasmore, Anthony Hill, John Ernest, and Mary and Kenneth Martin in Tate Britain's year-long display, Construction England. In 2013 her work was included in an exhibition in São Paulo, Brazil, of British and Brazilian constructive artists, of which elements were shown by the Dan Galleria gallery in the London 2013 Frieze event. Examples of her work are also held in many public collections including the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, the Arts Council and the Henry Moore Institute; and abroad in collections in the USA, Finland, and Hungary.