Holy Motor

An eclectic array of found materials, including a sliding door lock, a plastic cog and industrial off-cuts, have been carefully arranged in Holy Motor to create new relationships between their different surfaces, tones and forms. Holy Motor is attributed to Achill Redo, an alias created by the artist Anthony Hill in 1973.

Achill Redo exhibited collages and assemblages from the 1980s onwards, inspired by a longstanding interest in Dada and Surrealism. [1] This established a distinction between these works and the abstract geometric constructed reliefs and prints for which Hill was well known. However, he recognised them as related strands of his expansive creative practice:

‘If I am introduced to someone as being both a Dadaist and Constructivist I don’t have any objections. But making constructivist type works doesn’t mean that I am a signatory or member of any constructivist outfit. Likewise with Dada: I don’t do Redos in order to get labelled Dada, nor are Redos done in the shadow of Dada. Redos are Formalist, although in a different way from the constructive works I make.’ [2]

Michael Morris acquiredHoly Motor in 1993. The following year, Redo exhibited a selection of related works at the Mayor Gallery in London. In his catalogue essay for the exhibition, the critic David Sylvester highlighted the shared emphasis on composition and order in Redo and Hill’s work:

‘Despite the randomness with which the various elements in a given work seem chosen and brought together, despite their inconsistency, despite the air of improvisation with which they seem to have been put together, the total structure seems locked together, inevitably and immovably. As [Lawrence] Alloway said of Hill [in 1958]: “His reliefs are highly-wrought objects of great order”.’ [3]

Lisa Newby, March 2021

[1] Achill Redo exhibited in London at the Knoedler (Kasmin) Gallery in 1980, at Angela Flowers Gallery in 1983 and 1989, and at the Mayor Gallery in 1994.

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