Passionate precision

If you feel strong enough to postpone for a while the pleasures of the bookshop and the restaurant (without which it seems no self-respecting art gallery can exist these days), proceed upstairs at Camden Arts Centre into the light and welcoming hall, where the visitor is offered an introduction to the work of Kenneth and Mary Martin, husband and wife team of abstract artists, once deemed radical and avant-garde, but now somewhat out of fashion. Both came to abstraction relatively late, in the third wave, so to speak, after the Vorticists under Wyndham Lewis had initially ploughed the abstract furrow in England in 1914–18. The second wave was in the 1930s, when the sculptors had a go: Hepworth and Moore and the irrepressible Ben Nicholson making his beautiful white abstract reliefs. The Martins embraced abstraction in the 1940s, rediscovering it in a postwar context as an art of the environment, and bringing to it a shared, innovative vision that continues to have relevance today.