Moynihan, Rodrigo
Rodrigo Moynihan's career has encompassed many styles including abstraction, tonal realism, commissioned portraits and hard-edged still lifes.
After his lyrical abstracts of the mid 1930s, Moynihan reverted to figuration before turning again to abstraction in the late 1950s. In 1957, disillusioned by the pressures of teaching, portrait paintings and official duties, he resigned from the Royal Academy and his professorship at the Royal College of Art and moved to France. Free of official constraints, he has described these abstracts as being 'unpremeditated'. "I won't think about the painting, or the way I'm painting." These works show the influence of the New York painters who had shown in the important American exhibition at the Tate in 1956. Moynihan's early abstracts had mainly met with a hostile response, but by the 1960s there was a more accepting climate for abstraction.
Dark on White and Pink
1958