When, in 2019, Norman Dilworth was awarded the Peter C Ruppert prize for concrete art in Würzburg, Germany, he recalled the moment 40 years earlier when the owner of an Amsterdam gallery had first seen the work he intended to show there. “She looked around at the pieces on the walls, and the ones on the floor, and then she burst out laughing,” Dilworth told his audience. “And I thought, ‘How wonderful this is’.”
It was certainly unexpected. The works in the show, at the now closed Swart gallery, included pieces such as Horizontal II (1979), a wall-mounted graphic squiggle in stained wood. They did not seem an obvious cause for mirth. Even less so did the aesthetic philosophy that had led to them, a tendency of the late 1960s and early 70s known as systemic art.
Dilworth, who has died aged 92, had happened upon this by chance. Born in Wigan, Lancashire, to Joseph, the headmaster of St Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic primary school, and Alice (nee Tickle), an infants’ school teacher, he had initially hoped to be a mathematician. Discouraged from this at his Jesuit boarding school, Mount St Mary’s, Chesterfield, he decided instead on a career as an artist, going first to the Wigan School of Art (1948-52) and then to the Slade School in London (1952-56). A star student, he won the Slade’s Tonks prize for drawing and then, on graduating, a French government scholarship to study in Paris. The award’s judges had been Henry Moore, John Piper and Anthony Blunt.
France in the 1950s came as a revelation. Dilworth recalled sitting in Le Bar Monaco in St Germain with other intense young men, discussing “just how to put the postwar gloom behind us and wondering what we might do”. An introduction from William Coldstream, principal of the Slade, took him to the studio of Alberto Giacometti. It was another Parisian sculptor, François Morellet, who was to shape his future, though.
Morellet was shortly to join the 11-strong collective known as GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), which eschewed consumerism and individuality and called for the participation of the public. Best known for its labyrinths, the work of the group was also unexpectedly fun. As Morellet was to put it, it was “the kind of art you could go to on a picnic”.
Returning to Britain in 1958, Dilworth set about rekindling this Parisian spirit back home. It was not easy. The titles of the group shows he took part in – Structure, Constructions, and Experiments in Form (all 1966), Multiples (1969) – suggest the kind of art he was making. Morellet had hit on a system by which numbers chosen randomly from a telephone directory might dictate a painted grid.
In London, the newly-formed Systems Group was following a parallel path, making art that was based on simple, self-generating geometric forms that set up their own visual algebra. Although Dilworth did not formally join the group, he worked alongside them as a fellow traveller.
With six other artists, he produced the Rational Concepts (1977) portfolio of prints, one of which is now in the collection of the Tate. In the artist’s statement accompanying his print – an outlined cross with two ghost arms – Dilworth stressed the formal underpinnings of his art. “If I say ‘I draw a line’,” he wrote, “I use Subject-Verb-Object”. The intention, he later said, had been to “make work that would not be limited to the single object and sold to the elite. We would make multiple works affordable to everyone.” British critics scratched their heads, as did most gallerists.
The same was not true on the European continent. In 1973, Dilworth was included in an exhibition at the Swart called 4 English Systematic Artists. In 1975, he bought a flat in Amsterdam, moving there full time in 1982. Works such as Half by Half by Half by Half (1988-91) were intentionally self-effacing, creeping into corners and up gallery walls. He would have solo shows at the Swart every other year from 1976 to 1984, and then at another Amsterdam gallery, Art Affairs, from 1991 to 2000.
In between these, he showed at respected avant-garde galleries in Frankfurt and Hamburg, Groningen and Brussels. Not, however, in London. After co-curating the Hayward Gallery’s seminal show, Pier + Ocean, in 1980, Dilworth faded from British view. It was only in 2010 that he again exhibited in London, and even then it was at a French-owned gallery, Laurent Delaye.
In 2002, he and his French second wife, the photographer Christine Cadin, moved to Lille. Viewed in the Netherlands as a national treasure – after 20 years, Dilworth’s flat Wigan vowels were punctuated by interrogative Dutch “hehs” – he was given the singular honour of a farewell exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In Lille, he continued to make works such as Four by Four (2008), which remained true to his systematist principles while being inexplicably sprightly.
For all his lack of recognition at home, Dilworth continued to see an Englishness in his art. In his essay in the catalogue to a 2007 retrospective of his work at the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in north-east France, he mused on the difference between English and French church architecture. “One notices an angularity about English design in contrast with the flow and plasticity of its neighbour’s,” Dilworth wrote. “The parts are not moulded together, part is added to part and each allowed to live on its own. This ‘awkward angularity’, as Niklaus Pevsner called it, [is] characteristic of English art in general.” The ecclesiastical architects of medieval England had been systems artists avant la lettre.
Dilworth is survived by Christine and their sons, Christophe and Matthew, and by his children, Rachel, Joe and Jane, from a previous marriage, in 1958, to Mary Webber, which ended in 1976 in divorce.
• Norman Joseph Dilworth, artist, born 12 January 1931; died 25 January 2023
