For the duration of the Abbey Fellowship I examined the Etruscan collection in the Villa Guilia, and also undertaking a close examination of pre-and post-war Italian abstraction in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art.  I was very interested in looking at the Giacomo Balla paintings which I had seen many years ago.  I was particularly interested in the period from around 1915 to 1923 where Balla had abandoned a divisionist and ‘dynamist’ Futurist language for a more severe abstract style.  If the Futurist Balla was concerned almost with painting capturing a sense of expanded sensation (rhythm, movement, sound, vibration) then the abstract paintings of the period I selected explore more pictorial issues of form, composition, space, illusion, flatness; and rather than the depicted ‘speed’ of Futurism, they seem to explore a more internalized equilibrium between dynamic movement and classical repose of form, sculpted almost.  I was particularly intrigued by this approach.

— David Ryan