Geometric shapes form a brightly coloured pattern, with the words ‘bath’ and ‘mat’ blocked out horizontally and diagonally across the composition. Ian Gardner’s reference to A Constructivist Flag-Bathmat in the title is clearly tongue-in-cheek: on the one hand this flag-shaped work refers to the Soviet constructivist art movement and on the other hand it is representative of a much more mundane domestic object, the bathmat. Originating in Russia from 1919 onwards, Constructivism was an artistic movement based on geometric abstraction that rejected the idea of ‘art for art's sake’ in favour of art directed towards social purposes.
Gardner was one of many British artists who were interested in the combination of abstraction and symbolism in the 1960s and 1970s. Like other artists at the time, his work shows the influence of commercial art and advertising in its use of large blocks of flat colour and clear outline.
