The influential British art critic and curator has died
Guy Brett, the British curator, writer and driving force behind the groundbreaking Signals gallery and magazine during the 1960s has died, aged 78. Born in Yorkshire, Brett sought to broaden the historical canon by championing artists from Latin America and Asia through publications and exhibitions.
Brett started out as a critic at the Times, where he worked from 1964 to 1975. During these years, he also cofounded the Signals Gallery in the West End in London. A shortlived experiment (1964–66), the gallery quickly became a centre connecting the artistic avant-gardes of Latin America, Europe and London. Together with cofounders David Medalla, Paul Keeler, Gustav Metzger and Marcello Salvadori, Brett also published the influential Signals Newsbulletin, whose pages were dedicated to the ‘adventures of the modern spirit’, presenting the work of international artists along with poems and critical writing on a wide range of subjects from art and architecture to agriculture.
His first major exhibition, In Motion (1966), was a touring show on kinetic art funded by the Arts Council and included works by Takis, David Medalla, Lygia Clark, Jean Tinguely and Pol Bury. Years later, in 2000, Brett curated another influential group show, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic, which travelled from the Hayward Gallery in London to MACBA in Barcelona, as well as the 2019 retrospective of the Greek artist Takis at London’s Tate Modern.
