No painting should reveal all it has to say as a kind of instant impact. Abstract painting, that is painting that is not about subject matter, if it is any good should be as diverse, and complex, and strange and unaccountable and unnameable as an experience, as any painting of any consequence has been in the past. (Robyn Denny, ISIS art journal interview,1964)
Robyn Denny was one of the leading abstract painters and printmakers of his generation and helped transform and internationalize the British art scene in the the late 1950s and early 60s. He was born in Abinger, Surrey, in 1930, and studied in Paris and at St Martin’s School of Art, London, before graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1957. His paintings were soon included in important group shows such as the 1959 exhibition Place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Situation at the RBA Galleries, London, 1960; and London: the New Scene at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, which traveled on to Minneapolis and other places in the US in 1965. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966 and in 1973 was the youngest artist ever to be given a retrospective at the Tate Gallery.
His work is found in public collections all over the world, including at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Tate Gallery, London; Art Institute of Chicago; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Manchester Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Sydney; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.