Gwyther Irwin: Artist and teacher who forged a reputation as Britain's foremost collagist

When Gwyther Irwin participated in the ICA's exhibition "Three Collagists" in 1958 it marked the defining start of his career as England's foremost creator in this unusual format. Divorced from the singular craft precedents of Bloomsbury, and the eccentricities of British Surrealism, his uncompromising use of old and recycled poster hoardings, often removed under cover of night, gave his work a distinctive character. Over the next five years, Irwin established himself as a master of collage on the art scene both at home and abroad, sending 10 collages to the British Pavilion at the 1964 Venice Biennale: his international exhibiting CV was as impressive as any of his peers.

Born in 1931, he grew up in Trebetherick, north Cornwall where his parents built a house, Foredore, now a nursing home, which, returning full circle, was the place of his death. Gwyther was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset, where his art teacher in 1949 was Roger Hilton. He then studied at Goldsmiths from 1950 to 1951, and textiles at the Central School of Art between 1951 and 1954.

A year before he left the Central his gestural abstract paintings were included in one of the Royal Society of British Artists' "Young Contemporaries" exhibitions. By 1956 he was invited to show in Gallery One's mixed exhibition, leading to an invitation for a first solo exhibition there the following year: 1957 was a significant year for other reasons – eight works in the Redfern Gallery's important "Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract", and it was also the year in which he abandoned textiles and painting entirely for collage.

His three one-man exhibitions at Gimpel Fils, of 1959, 1962 and 1963, were equally well received by collectors and critics: "Gwyther Irwin's latest collages... are evidently miracles of patient assembly... they set out to achieve the subtlest and slowest possible shifts in tonality from umber darkness to creamy light and back again. The patience, the subtlety, the muted gradations of every effect combine to produce an atmosphere of studied beauty..." (The Times, 18 September 1959).

Articles and reviews, by Robert Melville, Alan Bowness, Denys Sutton, Roger Coleman, Mervyn Levy, Lawrence Alloway and David Sylvester, were all quick to champion a new British name working in a highly original and not at all British style. John Russell told a radio audience: "this is an immensely gifted artist in front of us". Even The Daily Express took an interest with the April 1960 article "Mr Irwin's Rubbish costs £1000."

The "rubbish" in question was the grimy advertising posters initially stripped off their hoardings (several layers at a time) under the cover of darkness by Irwin and his Montessori teacher wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1960. Great soggy piles of this raw material were later delivered by the lorry load to his studio at Bushey in Hertfordshire. From this residue of urban decay – discoloured and stained paper that had withstood rust, exhaust fumes and the London weather – Irwin fashioned collages of extraordinary subtlety and beauty.

John Russell wrote in The Sunday Times in 1959: "There is nothing in the least slapdash or indolent about Mr Irwin's pictures. They are built up with what Sickert would have called 'an almost Benedictine application'; and the result has, in many cases, a soft radiance, a far-held serenity of tone, and a quality as of landscapes conjectured in a dream. He manages, too, to work on a large scale without losing the fragile and trance-like character of his vision. Altogether these are curious and memorable works." In a later review, in 1963, Russell said of Irwin that he "cannot put two pieces of torn paper side by side without creating an atmosphere of poetic tenderness."

The collages often took the form of a trophy or an ancient leather armorial shield, brown recycled advertising material pasted centrally on to a black background; or dense accumulations of paper spread in monochromatic tones across the whole surface. They are essentially abstract, although visual associations were all cited in various reviews: ancient parchment, limestone caves, magnified plant cells, sheets of fine marble and mist-shrouded Chinese landscapes.

In Architectural Review, December 1959, Robert Melville wrote: "The backs of used posters serve his low-keyed, monochromatic sense of colour extremely well, and he only takes snippets from the printed side on the rare occasions when he feels the need to disturb his muted surfaces with a few bright accents... the effect puts one in mind of an ancient parchment with the inscriptions gone... his work acquires a hushed, meditative, faintly melancholy charm... the sense of light and purity conveyed by his assemblages of greyish paper scarred and soiled by soot lines and stained by stale paste is a remarkable accomplishment."

His "mature" collage style, seen at the Gimpel Fils exhibitions of 1962 and 1963, introduced a cleaner characteristic, pasting torn strips of paper in a roughly striped pattern across a black or white backing board, the voids between the strips becoming as significant as the paper itself. This added light and air led Alan Bowness, in the XXXII Venice Biennale catalogue of 1964 (Irwin was one of four artists representing Britain that year), to write of "a quietism that is almost oriental".

Alongside paper collage, Irwin experimented with flowing, coiling string, recalling the patterns in the sand left by the shifting tides, and a childhood spent on the north Cornish coast. Wood shavings, and corrugated cardboard, presented edge to view, recall the strata of a cliff face or geological rock formation: his studio was clad in corrugated iron, the undulating repetition of the heavily weathered metal proving an irresistible stimulus to him.

Working off a one-dimensional picture plane, a natural progression to low-relief painted wood constructions became his principal medium in the mid 1960s, and these were equally well received as the collages had been over a decade earlier.

Created in the same vein was the commission for the BP Headquarters at Moorfields: a huge rectangular relief carved from Portland Stone between 1965 and 1968. Now destroyed, it was a major site-specific commission measuring 70 feet long by 6 feet high, running the length of two exterior walls. Working on this and heavy wooden painted constructions was both physically exhausting and time consuming, and by the mid-1970s, Irwin had abandoned it, returning to painting large canvases – seldom under two metres long – which were shown at his one-man exhibitions of 1975 and 1978. In 1981, 60 smaller works on paper were created for a solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

During the 1960s his work as a visiting lecturer in art colleges never greatly disrupted his own, but in 1969, when he became Head of Painting at Brighton College of Art, the demands of running an art college, combined with a daily commute from his south London home, inevitably affected his output. The early 1980s were increasingly given over to teaching, and his retirement was a huge relief. He could concentrate wholly on the art again, and consequently, there was a resurgence of interest in his work from 1985 to 1995: Gimpel Fils held a retrospective in 1987, the Redfern Gallery gave him two shows in the early 1990s, and a show of large canvases was held at the Gallery at John Jones in 1992.

His freedom meant he could indulge again his love of poker and golf, and whenever the cricket was on it formed the background noise in his studio. There were three museum shows and his work was included in two important exhibitions of the 1960s, at the Barbican Art Gallery (1993), and Tate Britain (2004), who added to their collection Letter Rain (1959) in 2005.

Irwin stopped working in the late 1990s, as gradually Alzheimer's disease took its hold. By 2006, when JHW Fine Art and the Redfern Gallery mounted a selective retrospective show, it could only be organised with the co-operation of his wife. Even as his own capabilities declined, the stature of his creativity continues to be recognised.

Magdalen Evans

David Gwyther Broome Irwin, artist: born Basingstoke, Hampshire 7 May 1931; married 1960 Elizabeth Gowlett (two sons, one daughter); died Trebetherick, Cornwall 18 October 2008.