LONDON.- More than half a century after her last commercial solo presentation in her hometown, British abstract artist Marlow Moss is returning to the London spotlight with Marlow Moss: Space, Movement & Light, an exhibition at Ward Moretti that brings together rarely seen works from private collections.

The exhibition seeks to reposition Moss within the history of European modernism, where her contribution to Constructivism and Neoplasticism has often been overshadowed by that of her friend and contemporary Piet Mondrian. Ward Moretti describes the show as the first commercial solo presentation of Moss in London in more than 50 years and an opportunity to reconsider an artist whose rigorous geometric language developed alongside, rather than simply in imitation of, her better-known peers.

Born Marjorie Jewel Moss in London in 1889, the artist moved through several phases of experimentation before settling in Paris in 1927, then the center of the international avant-garde. There she studied at the Académie Moderne with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant and encountered artists and architects associated with Cubism, Constructivism and De Stijl. Over time, she stripped curved forms from her work and increasingly relied on carefully calculated relationships between lines, planes and primary colors.

Moss met Mondrian in Paris in 1929, beginning a friendship that lasted for nearly a decade. Although their work shared the reduced vocabulary of Neoplasticism, the two artists approached composition differently. Mondrian often worked intuitively, while Moss relied heavily on measurements, proportions and mathematical relationships. She also embraced diagonal elements that Mondrian generally rejected.

One of Moss’s most important innovations was the use of the double line, which she introduced around 1930. Rather than allowing a single line to divide the picture into isolated areas, she believed parallel lines could establish what she called a “continuity of related and inter-related rhythm in space,” giving the composition greater dynamism. Mondrian subsequently incorporated double lines into his own work, though later histories frequently credited the device to him rather than to Moss.





Her place within the European avant-garde was nevertheless substantial. In 1931, Moss joined the Abstraction-Création group, an international association established to promote non-figurative art. She became the only British woman whose work appeared in all five annual issues of the group’s journal, alongside artists including Jean Arp, Auguste Herbin and members of De Stijl.

Moss’s career was profoundly disrupted by the Second World War. She and her partner, the Dutch writer Antoinette “Netty” Nijhoff, had settled in Normandy in the late 1930s, where Moss established a home and studio filled with her own work and pieces by fellow artists. After the outbreak of war, Moss, who was Jewish, fled France. The property was later bombed, and much of her early work was destroyed, a loss that has complicated later attempts to reconstruct the evolution of her practice.

Moss eventually settled in Cornwall, where she continued to pursue painting, drawing and sculpture. Her methods remained painstakingly precise. Preparatory drawings were measured, revised and sometimes accompanied by mathematical notations, while paintings could require numerous thin layers of paint in pursuit of a surface from which the artist’s hand appeared almost entirely absent.

Despite periods of recognition during her lifetime, including exhibitions at London’s Hanover Gallery, Moss largely disappeared from standard histories of modern art after her death in 1958. Postwar exhibitions gradually revived interest in her work, while more recent scholarship has increasingly challenged the notion that she was simply a follower of Mondrian.

The works assembled by Ward Moretti come entirely from private collections, making the exhibition an unusual opportunity to see paintings, works on paper and constructions that are normally inaccessible to the public. The gallery notes that the scarcity of surviving works made the exhibition particularly difficult to organize.

Among the works documented in the catalogue is Composition in Black, Blue and White of 1952, an oil on canvas that was shown at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1955 and later at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Another, White, Black, Yellow and Blue of 1954, was included in Moss’s 1958 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery and has more recently appeared at Tate Britain, Haus Konstruktiv and other European institutions.

The exhibition title, Space, Movement & Light, distills the qualities Moss herself considered fundamental to her art. At one point she declared, “I am no painter, I don’t see form, I only see space, movement and light.”

For Ward Moretti, the exhibition is intended not only to recover an overlooked chapter of modernism but to present Moss as an independent and uncompromising artist whose geometric language was the product of sustained experimentation, scientific curiosity and an unusually exacting sense of visual order.