Victor Pasmore

Victor Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey, on 3 December 1908. He was educated at Summer Fields School in Oxford and later at Harrow in west London. After his father’s death in 1927, he took a clerical position with the London County Council while studying painting part-time at the Central School of Art. He became linked to the founding of the Euston Road School. Although he later explored abstraction, for a period he worked in a lyrical figurative manner, producing Thames river scenes from Hammersmith reminiscent of Turner and Whistler. Pasmore is known as one of the leading protagonists of the twentieth-century abstract art movement in Britain. Victor Pasmore gained significant international recognition as an abstract artist, especially after exhibiting at the 1960 Venice Biennale. This eventually led him to Malta. After buying and converting a farmhouse in Gudja in 1966, he settled there permanently with his wife, Wendy, and their two children. In Malta, Pasmore formed close friendships with local artists and intellectuals and continued exploring new ideas in form, colour, space, and meaning until his death in 1998. His time there contributed to a highly prolific and influential career.