Relief Construction

In Relief Construction Anthony Hill composes relationships between the volumes and surfaces of industrial materials. For example, the thickness of the blockboard slab is equal to the depth of the aluminium sections and informed their arrangement on the white and transparent Perspex surfaces of the relief. While some aspects of the arrangement were carefully planned, others were intuitive or consequential, as Hill highlights in his description of this work:

‘The choice of a square for the left-hand area was deliberate, but the right-hand area (the transparent plane) was not predetermined, the intention was simply an area greater than half. The height of the small angle sections was similarly chosen to be less than half.

The placing of the angle sections at equal distances is part of the theme, the width of the sections being equal to the thickness of the slab.

The exact relation of the areas was not discovered until after the work was completed, as with many other features.’ [1]

The relationships between the abstract elements of the relief come in and out of view as the spectator moves around the completed relief. Hill considered this experience to be a crucial aspect of his constructed reliefs, describing them as ‘a mechanism that is completed by a physical context and its interaction with the spectator.’ [2]

Hill worked on the composition of Relief Construction between 1956 and 1960 and made multiple versions. He gave this work to Michael Morris in 1963.

Lisa Newby, February 2021

[1] Anthony Hill, ‘The Structural Syndrome in Constructive Art’, in Module, Symmetry, Proportion, ed. by György Kepes (London: Studio Vista, 1966), p.166.

[2] Ibid., p.163.