Bob Law valuation

Bob Law (1934–2004) was born in Brentford, Middlesex. In 1957 he moved to a cottage at Nancledra, outside St Ives, where Peter Lanyon encouraged him to paint. There he made his Field drawings, lying on his back in a field and reducing the sun, trees and clouds to simple signs inside a hand-drawn boundary, each sheet dated. A two-person exhibition with Peter Hobbs at the ICA in London in 1960 brought him to notice. He went on to make open drawings, little more than an outline around an empty sheet, and black paintings in combinations of dark colours, ten of which were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1974. Nicholas Serota curated his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1978. The Castle paintings, white in the mid-1970s and in primary colours in the 1990s, repeat a simplified castle form with small changes from one to the next. By the early 1980s he was also making sculpture, including obelisks in cast iron and bronze. His work is in Tate, the British Museum, the Guggenheim and the Stedelijk Museum. He returned to live in west Cornwall in 1997.

Law made unique paintings on canvas, a large body of drawings in pencil and oil stick on paper, and sculpture in iron, bronze and steel, some of it in small editions, so check the edition number on a cast. Many works carry their date in the title or beneath the image. Pale and black monochrome surfaces show scuffs, fingerprints and fading easily, so condition matters, and a gallery invoice and exhibition history should go with the work.