John Ernest

John Ernest ( born May 6, 1922 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, † July 21, 1994 in Exeter, United Kingdom) was an American painter, printmaker and relief artist who spent most of his life in Britain. He is considered an important representative of constructivist art and geometric abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s in the UK.

Life and work

John Ernest studied from 1936 to 1941 in Philadelphia and New York City. 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 in the AIA Gallery, which impressed him very much. In the same year he began to study at the St Martin's School of Art, he came there 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 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 taught at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham.

John Ernest created reliefs and freestanding sculptural constructions. Some of his works are part of the collection of the Tate Gallery in London. He designed 1961einen tower and a large wall -relief for the Congress of the International Union of Architects, South Bank, London. He had his first solo exhibition in July 1964, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA ) in London. In 1968, he was with four colored metal reliefs participants in the documenta 4 in Kassel.

Ernest was known for his precise and careful work. Symmetry and asymmetry were essential elements of its reliefs. He used Applied Mathematics and geometry for his compositions, but kept the underlying theories simple, similar to Pasmore and Hill. John Ernest had a lifelong fascination for mathematics, together with his colleague Anthony Hill he delivered, for example, contributions to graph theory.

Literature and sources

  • Exhibition catalog for Documenta IV: IV documentation. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: ( painting and sculpture ); Volume 2: (graphics / objects ); Kassel 1968
  • Kimpel, Harald / stem, Karin: documenta IV International Exhibition 1968 - A photographic reconstruction ( Series of the documenta - Archives); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9
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