Construction, Intersection
- Artist: John Piper
- Date: 1934
- Medium: Oil paint and wooden dowels on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 533 x 635 x 52 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
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About this artwork
This is “Construction, Intersection” by John Piper, made in 1934. The work is a relief built from oil paint and wooden dowels set into a canvas frame. Piper was inspired after seeing a De Stijl exhibition in Paris featuring Cesar Domela’s reliefs, which led him to create this piece for his first London show in 1935. A critic described the construction as “from hunks of cable, rods, drums, ribbed lavatory panes, strips of perforated bluebottle‑metal…” and imagined “underground wiring diagrams” or even a “nightmare relief map” that an electrician might improvise while sleeping. The geometric arrangement—planes of white, tan, brown, black, straight and curving lines, dotted and solid—evokes nautical objects: masts, buoys, floats. Piper’s choice of wooden dowels painted in two whites and a black, set at angles, adds depth to the flat planes and creates a tactile sense of space and texture. The piece sits comfortably within his early 1930s abstract relief series, a key moment where he explored painterly aspects of depth through sculptural gesture.
See it in person
Construction, Intersection is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
