James Ross is known for his innovative multi-panel paintings that exploit unusual contours or occasionally cut-out holes to avoid conventional rectangular formats. In the nineteen seventies he created trapezoid colour-field abstractions that alluded to the vertical human form in a landscape. In the mid nineteen eighties he developed the more baroque format for which he is now known, with a more agitated surface area and images of anamorphically distorted skulls or the moving female form, sometimes with carefully positioned isolated circular components. In the late 1990s Ross began to make more minimalist works, with drawn-on, kite-shaped, diamond forms made up of butted-up panels. These had circular or rectangular panes ofglass suspended over their painted surfaces via screws, exerting a tension on the contours below. His most recent paintings abandon the glass and have tilted coloured plywood planes projecting out from the wall, attached to it only by one edge. They are more aggressively sculptural.
