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.
