This exhibition will contain a ‘museum’ of printed matter related to British Construction and Systems Art, with a selection of contemporary artists exhibiting in parallel. The artists have been invited to place their work alongside, rather than respond or comment directly to archive material, but the resulting juxtapositions bring to bear important questions about the current interest in revisiting art rooted in the concrete and constructive.

The legacy of Constructivism suggests something more complex and challenging than merely reconsidering abstract modernism as a playing out, again, of the dialectic of grid and gesture. The artists here not only represent nuanced approaches to grid, gesture, surface, repetition, rational formulae and so on, but also seem to celebrate the aspects of modernism that inform their positions without fear, as part of their wider address.