David Saunders (b.1936)
 
Colour Symmetry 501 1,2,3 &4
 
1978-1979
 
Acrylic on canvas
 
Provenance : Conoco Phillips Collection
 
David Saunders is best known for his involvment in the 'Colour Systems' movementt along with Jeffrey Steel and Malcolm Hughes in the late 1960's. Culminating a a colour Systems show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972.   The artists in the Systems Group shared an interest in logical and mathematical processes, a sharing of information, the unity of ethics and aesthetics and logic and the rejection of individualistic expressionism. In 1972 an important exhibition entitled “Systems” opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and toured public venues in the UK.
 
Saunders was a leading thinker within the group. His own work is distinguished by a belief that we no longer see art as isolated discrete objects, but as a field of overlapping and connected cyclic processes, as forms oscillating between the determinate and the indeterminate, and between the abstract and the real. He insists that complex mental activity can be generated by a collection of signs even if the observer is totally unaware of the ‘code’ according to which they have been assembled. The ‘code’ should however, remain rational and decipherable.
 
Tate Britain held an exhibition including Saunders work in 2016-2017  'Systems 1972'
 
See David Saunders website -  www.davidsaunders.info
 
Selected collections
 
Tate Gallery, London
 
Southampton City Art Gallery
 
Arts Council of England
 
Arts Council of Wales
 
The British Library, London
 
Dean Clough Collection, Halifax
 
Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt
 
Gemeente Museum, The Hague
 
Logica PLC, London
 
Rijksmuseum Meermano, The Hague
 
Stamford University, USA
 
University of Sussex
 
Victoria and Albert Museum, London