John Latham, 1970
John Latham's first solo show, ‘The Gallery Does Not Exist for 100 Years’, 1970, temporarily displaced the gallery to London Zoo and Hyde Park’s boating lake, among other venues. A photograph shows Latham perched in small river-boat on Serpentine lake, holding a sign labelled 'Lisson Gallery' to announce his own exhibition opening.
Here Richard Hamilton writes about Latham's linguistic and revolutionary practice: "Since 1954 he has been putting together words and images that might illuminate the meaning of his minimal drawing. His approach is divinatory, poetic, and bewildering to us, much in the way Joshua Reynolds and the eighteenth-century public must have been baffled by William Blake. Just as Blake was rigorous in his determination to use the new science of anatomy to represent his vision of creation, so Latham insists on the taut, muscular equations that modern scientific methods require, along with images that are perfectly consistent with the historic progression for advanced thinking in modern art, whether it be those made by Vincent Van Gogh, Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, or one made by Willem de Kooning and erased by Robert Rauschenberg. In this, Latham is less of a historic aberratio than was Blake.”
- Richard Hamilton, ‘Early Works 1954 – 1972’, exhibition catalogue, 1987
Here Richard Hamilton writes about Latham's linguistic and revolutionary practice: "Since 1954 he has been putting together words and images that might illuminate the meaning of his minimal drawing. His approach is divinatory, poetic, and bewildering to us, much in the way Joshua Reynolds and the eighteenth-century public must have been baffled by William Blake. Just as Blake was rigorous in his determination to use the new science of anatomy to represent his vision of creation, so Latham insists on the taut, muscular equations that modern scientific methods require, along with images that are perfectly consistent with the historic progression for advanced thinking in modern art, whether it be those made by Vincent Van Gogh, Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, or one made by Willem de Kooning and erased by Robert Rauschenberg. In this, Latham is less of a historic aberratio than was Blake.”
- Richard Hamilton, ‘Early Works 1954 – 1972’, exhibition catalogue, 1987