Experimental artist and long time Chiswick resident Barry Martin has died, aged 82. Here is an extract from his obituary in The Times:

Tate Britain, London, 1991. Four talented young women were performing a piece by the controversial avant-garde composer John Cage in the presence of the great man himself. Author of the silent piano piece 4′33″, Cage was notorious for introducing chance elements into his work, in this case a string quartet. Suddenly the cellist collapsed and dropped her instrument. In one bound Barry Martin, artist and co-organiser with Nicholas Serota of the Chess and Art Symposium at which the piece was being performed, leapt onto the stage, rescued instrument and maiden, and in one breath asked Cage: “Was this an accident or a chance incident?”

Cage was an inspiration to Martin, as indeed was Marcel Duchamp who, like Martin, was not only an artist but also a chess player of international reputation. Like Duchamp he combined humour and irony in his work across every medium, from painting to film and performance, always challenging conventions and pretensions of the art world of the day.

Barry Martin was born in 1943 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, but grew up in Kent. He never knew his American father, John Bonnell from the Bonnelli family of Italian immigrant farmers in Virginia. Bonnell’s fluency in Italian took him to Anzio on January 22, 1944, in the advance military party charged with clearing mines ahead of the Allied landings, but one found him first.

His mother, Rosemary, married a merchant seaman whose homecoming luggage never disappointed the wide-eyed stepson. The traveller’s wonderful gifts ranged from a monkey and a bush baby to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper made of iridescent butterflies. At Brockley County Grammar School in southeast London young Barry so excelled at mathematics, economics and geography, with a fourth A-level in art, that expectations of studying economics at university rose. But he had an unusual hobby, one that suggested a wider ambition, for in his spare time he flew as an air cadet in gliders high above the South Downs. He gained his glider pilot’s licence at 17 and dreamed of joining the Fleet Air Arm and of then becoming an astronaut.

Saturday morning art classes at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at Camberwell School of Art gave him other ideas and from school he went up to Goldsmiths in 1961 to study fine art and from there in 1966 to postgraduate study at Saint Martins. His was a remarkable generation in the history of British art, for fellow students included Gilbert and George, Richard Long and Bruce McLean, artists who were not intimidated by the towering influence at that time of the sculpture of Henry Moore. While Moore’s former assistant Anthony Caro was beginning to forge a new Anglo-American alternative, with abstract compositions in painted scrap steel that would became a house style for St Martin’s, down in the basement Martin curated and filmed a performance with fellow students stripped to their swimwear, blindfolded and exploring an unknown environment to the sounds of trains and whales, as “spacemen”.

Space, time and movement became the lifelong themes of Martin’s work, as a painter, sculptor, film-maker and performance artist. He also wrote influential articles as a regular reviewer for Studio International, analysing the latest exhibitions in Sixties London with the observation skills he had honed in class and in the air as a glider pilot. His own work attracted reviews in the national press with his first one-man show in Chelsea in 1968.

Two years later anyone passing the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank could not miss on the terrace his 14ft-tall group of motorised steel, Perspex and laminated wood, Moving Sculpture, announcing the International Kinetics Exhibition within. At that time Kinetic Art was the European and South American movement that seemed to offer an alternative to artists who remained unconvinced by Anglo-American abstraction and Pop Art. Martin and his metal machines and light shows led the field, fascinating in their seemingly random but ordered way of working. They still do today (in collections of the Science Museum, the Tate and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds) for, unlike so many Kinetic sculptures that were assembled with British “Heath Robinson” eccentricity, Barry Martin’s precision instruments are not only disturbing and beautiful but still work.

Martin managed to stay productive, indeed, prolific, while in demand as a teacher, at Goldsmiths, Central St Martins, the Royal College of Art, the Slade and the Royal Academy. Among his best known students was Malcolm McLaren (later manager of the Sex Pistols and partner of Vivienne Westwood) — even if he only taught him how to electrify dead chickens. As an artist Martin moved on from machines to paint vast canvases full of joyous colour and abstract forms, to make prints and drawings that manage to embody his fascination with movement and time in a way that recalls the work of Italian Futurists and British Vorticists, and to experiment in so many fields.

In 1989 Martin took over the lease of a semi-derelict gate lodge in Hounslow and set about restoring it as his studio with the architect Theo Crosby. In so doing, he became, for the rest of his life, the artist in residence at Chiswick House, Lord Burlington’s Palladian villa and Italianate gardens, in the footsteps of Burlington’s own artist, William Kent. He soon recognised obscure symbols in the design and decoration of the villa’s architecture and after substantial research published his discovery of Chiswick’s original function, as a lodge for Freemasonry. Martin was a naturally gifted portraitist and drew a circle of eminent actors to his studio in the park; among his sitters were Peter Egan, Ian Holm, John Alderton and Pauline Collins.

Martin’s self-portraits were very different. In a series of life-size studies in black chalk he is decked in a gown with a high collar covered in symbols, as if some grand master prowling around the Chiswick villa and garden pavilions in the depth of night. In contrast, he organised in 2014 a performance with the principal choreographer and six dancers from the Ballet Rambert around a garden temple, composed as a celebration of architectural design and rhythms in four acts by living Kinetic sculptures.

In January 2025 Martin was invited to Pakistan to receive the country’s Gold Medal for contributions to culture and art. His works are held in the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Council Collection, the Victoria and Albert, and in museums abroad, from St Louis to Paris and Zaragoza. His legacy lives on, not only through his art in public collections but also in his publications and reputation. For students at Central St Martins there is a distinction named in his honour — the Barry Martin Award for Experimental Art. It supports adventurous and boundary-breaking art produced by Central Saint Martins graduates, rooted in the legacy of its namesake, providing crucial recognition for emerging artists at pivotal stages in their careers.

Within the world of chess, too, Martin’s presence will endure. His art has long explored ideas of movement and meaning in games such as chess, where intellect and imagination are locked in disciplined struggle. In 1989 Garry Kasparov presented him with the Chelsea Arts Club Chess Trophy as winner of their championship and over the next decade he captained the club’s chess team. For the club’s celebration of John Cage’s birthday he designed a cake in the shape of Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal.

When in 1991 he co-organised at Tate Britain the Chess and Art Symposium, attended by Teeny Duchamp, widow of Marcel, and Cage, one of Duchamp’s disciples, it was a gathering where art, thought and play converged in a way that would have pleased England’s only world chess champion, Howard Staunton. Martin designed the headstone for Staunton’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery and his creative treatment of his Victorian portrait was adopted by the Howard Staunton Society as its public image. And yes, the collapsing cellist in the John Cage was unwell, but recovered.

Martin served as the official artist for the World Chess Championships in 1993, producing pastel portraits and sketches of Nigel Short and Kasparov.

He is survived by his wife Sarah, director of a soft furnishings studio in London, and their daughter Jessie, an executive assistant to musicians.

Handsome, humorous and charming, his critical eye undimmed, Barry Martin was never short of elegant company at exhibition openings and at the Chelsea Arts Club.

Barry Martin, artist and chess player, was born on February 20, 1943. He died on December 12, 2025, aged 82

Sunday January 04 2026, 7.30pm, The Times