Blue/Red – To Len Lye

In Blue/Red – To Len Lye, there is what Mary Lee Thompson has described as ‘an angry truce between equally belligerent blue and red’. The painting was first exhibited in 1980 at the gallery Modernism in San Francisco. In the catalogue for the exhibition, Ronny H. Cohen wrote:

‘Max Gimblett is a color visionary of a new, direct and boldly contemporary kind. Since 1965 he has made color the essence of his art and worked towards realising color’s infinite potential for emotive expression. Pure and sensuous, reticent and aggressive, specific and mysterious, his color has the capacity to move the eye, mind and emotions … Gimblett’s content is color, color is content: in his paintings color is always turning, always moving, always charged with exciting perceptual, intellectual and emotional sensations.’

Blue/Red – To Len Lye is offered as a non-specific homage to the internationally renowned Aotearoa-born sculptor Len Lye (1901–80), who died the same year it was painted. The two artists first met in 1974 in New York City, where Lye lived from 1944 and where Gimblett has been lived since 1972. In 1990, Gimblett became a Trustee of the Len Lye Foundation, based in Ngāmotu New Plymouth.