These three works, constituting part of John Golding’s ‘Predella Series’, were first shown together at Piano Nobile’s recent exhibition, John Golding: Finding the Absolute at the Kings Place, Kings Cross gallery. This exhibition focused on John Golding’s hard-edged abstract paintings from the 1960s, works from early in his distinguished career as an artist as he began moving into abstraction from his previous figurative works. The works at first appear bold and exuberant statements of great confidence, however they are characterised by subtlety, precision and attention to detail demanding close inspection. The vast majority of these works, including the ‘Predella Series’, had never been seen before Piano Nobile's exhibition and thus Art15 represents only the second ever presentation of these Predella works. This trio of paintings, 'Untitled', 'Predella (Red + Rose)' and 'Blue Predella' (all 1967), alongside one other similar work, Predella: Two Blues (1967), in the collection of the London Borough of Camden, constitute the Predella series: large-scale, vertical abstract canvases. These three paintings represent the culmination into Golding's investigation into the motif of a composition consisting of the interrelationship of just two tonally similar colours. In each painting an identical shape spreads down through the vertical canvas: one colour over another colour. Although the colours change across each work, within each painting the two colours are very close (emerald green/light blue, red/rose, royal blue/light blue). Small changes and subtle adjustment to tone suggest a musically inspired theme and variation. The influence of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the work of Barnett Newmann, is palpable in this particular format of Golding's 60s works. As an art historian Golding wrote prolifically on the New York School of the 1940s, 1950s and beyond, and indeed it was Abstract Expressionism's greatest advocate, the critic Clement Greenberg, who persuaded Golding during a trip to the USA to begin his own artistic ventures into abstraction. Equally, however, the significance of Cubism, the movement on which Golding wrote his first, seminal, publication in 1959, is evident in the experiment with the appearance of a shape placed upon a background. Alongside his canvases Golding produced many folios of collages in paper and board exploring, with almost identical shapes, the infinite shifting variations of effect created through colour. This utilisation of cut-out work demonstrates the importance of this practice to informing Golding's practice. The tactile appeal of the works, strongly related to Golding's preparatory collage work, encourages a sensational and bodily response to the paintings. Golding himself later said of his abstracts from the 1970s: 'I see them as objects to which the spectator, the human body or presence, can measure up to, or relate to…the pictures themselves become metaphors for bodies'. Seen together as a trio these Predella works are a unique investigation into the optical effects of colour, made manifest through Golding's extraordinarily subtle handling of the acrylic and oil paint. As a set, the colours of each painting impact upon each other, altering, enhancing and emphasising different colour aspects. Thin layers of paint built up over time contribute to a textured canvas surface with hints of subtlety shifting colour variants within one shade. Within each painting extended contemplation of colour is encouraged by the tonal similarities between the shape and background. The colours are palpably of their time, and curiously artificial - Golding was working primarily in the new medium of acrylic, and thus the paintings are rooted in the 1960s. Despite the evident modernity of the paintings, Golding's titles, Predella, are an art historical reference. John Golding was an eminent art historian and much loved teacher at the Courtauld Institute of Art as well as a critic and curator. His works from the mid to late 1960s frequently have evocative titles relating to music, classical mythology and religious references, as with the Predella trio. In medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, the predella is the section with multiple small panels underneath the main body of the altarpiece. These panels often constitute a narrative cycle to complement the more iconic scenes above, and thus the titular reference is of particular interest as it would suggest that these paintings are very much meant to be understood as a related unit.