Robyn Denny was born in 1930 in Surrey and belongs to a generation of British abstract artists who, having passed through London art schools in the 1950s, had by the turn of the decade made a decisive break with the pastoral abstraction of the preceding era. By the early 1960s, Denny arrived at what we might call his mature style after absorbing the practical example of recent American abstract painting. Denny explored a range of solutions to his theoretical interests in contemporary notions of social interactivity and the nature of language, symbol, and image in art. From this point onwards, pared down abstract compositions were to form the bulk of Denny's production. In 1966, Denny was selected - alongside Anthony Caro, Richard Smith, and Bernard and Harold Cohen - to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale and by 1973 became the youngest artist ever to be given a retrospective by the Tate.
The artist died on 20 May 2014.