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Michael Tyzack

Köln

This painting brings together colour with broad horizontal bands with an active set of diagonals.  The diamond format is spliced horizontally from corner to corner but the top and bottom triangles (which can be read as bands whose outer width meets the corner) are slightly wider - than the inner slices, visually compensating for their reduced area.  The brown locks in to the strip of chromatic with tonal variations of green and blue bands.  The left half of the variegated strip is black, which could be read as equally on the picture-surface as the other sombre slices, whereas the chromatic bands appear behind these them, glimpsed, shining forth through an aperture.

Discounting the width of the brown band up the lower right edge, the diamond is 'secretly' bisected from lower left to top right at the edge of the black triangle, though we would assume the visually active area around the light brown beside the pink to constitute that division.  One then senses a whole diagonal organisation overlaid by horizontal bands.  The title perhaps alludes to the diagonally thrusting effects of coloured light in Cologne's Gothic cathedral.  Reference to the spiritual and a tense relationship the vertical and the diagonal indicate Tyzack's admiration for Barnett Newman, whose Chartres was produced in 1969.

Thumbnail for Köln Köln

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  • Michael Tyzack biography.pdf (146.77 KB)

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Nationality

British

Education

  • 1950-52: Sheffield College of Art and Crafts
  • 1952-56: Slade School of Art

Taught

  • c1964: visiting tutor at Cardiff and Hornsey colleges of art
  • 1971-2005: Professor of Fine Arts, College of Charleston
  • 1981: Distinguished Research Award, College of Charleston

Background

An early widening of Tyzack’s experience came with a French Government scholarship that took him to Paris in 1956.  Later he was to move to the United States to develop his career both as a painter and as Professor of Fine Art.  During the 1980s the artist survived a serious car crash and continued both painting and teaching.
 

The artist

Tyzack, who had been taught at the Slade School by William Coldstream, Lucian Freud and William Townsend, was awarded the First Prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1965, when the American art critic Clement Greenberg was the jury chairman.  During the Sixties and Seventies he exhibited at dozens of galleries, including Axiom, Demarco and Mappin; at this time he was also a professional jazz trumpeter.  There were further one-man exhibitions in U.S.A. between 1973 and 2001, together with numerous group exhibitions and works purchased for public collections.

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