Collection: Bob Law

Bob Law (1934–2004) was a British artist whose work from the late 1950s onwards pursued a radical reduction of means — black paintings, minimal drawings and works on paper that approached the limits of visibility and mark-making. His Field Drawings recorded his experience of sitting in fields at dusk, translating duration and perception into spare notations on paper. His large black canvases, developed through the 1960s and 1970s, were among the most uncompromising works produced in Britain during the period, resisting both the decorative and the conceptually illustrative in favour of sustained confrontation with the painted surface. Law was also a significant participant in the broader British conceptual scene: his project 1–1,000,000 – Drawing – Art for All (1970–2) invited anyone to continue an accumulating sequence of numbers on a continuous paper roll, proposing an artwork without fixed authorship, scale or endpoint.