Martin Naylor
Byronic artist whose mixed-media assemblages encapsulated the troubled post-Sixties zeitgeist
MARTIN NAYLOR, the artist, who has died aged 72, came to prominence as a force to be reckoned with in the British contemporary art scene of the 1970s. His mixed-media assemblages, which combined figuration and abstraction, painting, photography and sculpture, mirrored, in their overt violence and threat, an era of civic and global unrest – in contrast to the sunny, if superficial, optimism of the Sixties.
The art was the man. Alister Warman, who gave Naylor a 1986 retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, described him as a Regency character in the romantic Byronic mould, pugilistic and poetic. If the mixed-media pieces which made his name were attuned to the trouble postSixties zeitgeist, they had their origin in the Existentialism of the Fifties.
To be an angry outsider was the mark of integrity. Naylor exemplified the black-clad, rive-gauche bad boy of the London art scene, seeking inspiration as well as teaching his craft. Between 1972 and 1982 he also taught in France at Nice, Bourges and the Cité International des Arts, Paris.
Martin Naylor was born in Morley, near Leeds, in 1944. After Leeds Art College and before entering the Royal College of Art, he worked as a technician in the University of Leeds’ psychology department. There he met the lecturer Douglas Sandle, who recognised his artistic talent and recommended him to his brother, the sculptor Michael Sandle, a formidable maverick in the Wyndham-Lewis tradition. It proved a meeting of minds; both men were admirers of the music of Anton Bruckner, a composer capable of violent dissonance and symphonic grandeur. Following the visit Naylor handed in his notice as a technician.
Naylor soon won prizes and awards. By his early thirties he was a lecturer at the Royal College of Art and other influential British art colleges, as well as visiting professor at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Nice. In 1973 he received a Gregory Fellowship in Sculpture at Leeds University. He thus followed in the footsteps of such famous older artists as Alan Davie and Kenneth Armitage, the latter also from Leeds, with whom he became friends, having fortuitously rented a flat next door to his Olympia studio. In 1974 he joined Alec Gregory-Hood’s renowned Rowan Gallery, and three years later he represented Great Britain at the São Paulo Biennial.
Gregory-Hood, a hero of Arnhem and formerly Colonel of the Grenadiers, was amused rather than challenged by strong characters. He enjoyed inviting art-world friends, however chippy, to his family home, Loxley Hall in Warwickshire, where he showed his artists’ work indoors and out and introduced them to his country neighbours, raising even bohemian eyebrows by sweeping down for dinner in a kaftan. Among his gallery stable were Anthony Green, Paul Huxley, Phillip King and Bridget Riley. Naylor was in the vanguard of a nascent group which included Brian Young, Michael Craig-Martin, Barry Flanagan and Sean Scully.
“Simple solutions don’t interest me,” wrote Naylor. “I fight emotional anaemia by looking for poetry in heavy, loaded, complex deliveries.” His aim was to make his art “highly emotional, awkward, difficult and embarrassing for the spectator” in the hope that it would prove therapeutic for both parties. Glass was placed in precarious proximity to found pieces of heavy industrial ironmonger; hostile implements, such as scissors and knives, were threateningly
Study on the Death of Innocence, Between Discipline and Desire Discarded Sweater.
In 1984 he reigned as head of sculpture at Hornsey College of Art and thereafter preferred posts abroad, enforced when he married the Argentine psychotherapist Liliana Maler and loss of premises led to the closure of the Rowan Gallery (after brief partnerships with Annely Juda Fine and the Mayor Gallery). He settled for some years in Buenos Aires where, as an unapologetic cricket-loving Yorkshireman and in the wake of the Falklands war, he was, in the words of his friend and fellow Yorkshireman, the artist Robert Mason, “something of a sensation” – dashingly augmented by his playing polo, a game which suited his bold spirit.
International recognition was consolidated by gallery and museum shows in Spain, Italy, New York, The Yale Centre for British Art, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Montevideo.
Painting, characteristically using black and red in robustly expressionist abstractions, increasingly preoccupied him. When his health deteriorated he and his wife returned to London, but he could find neither strength nor will to revive what had been a considerable art career, the legacy of which is in some of the foremost public collections here and abroad.
His wife survives him. Martin Naylor, born October 11 1944, died December 31 2016