In Architectural Exercise, 1962, Willats continues his distillation of high-rise architecture – using the idea of the window, the lift and the building’s verticality while introducing new colours that signalled a deliberate break with the past. Speaking about this work, he comments, ‘I was fascinated by the idea that the window was this dynamic vehicle, this projection that you made into reality, but at the same time you were distant from it because you had the plane of the glass. It was like an encoding mechanism that made a picture. At another level I was also interested in the idea that the building itself was a kind of prison, that you could become entombed within it, and distant from reality, right up in the sky.’

Stephen Willats was born in 1943 in London, where he continues to live and work. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include Languages of Dissent at Migros Museum, Zürich (2019). His work has also recently been featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019– 2020), Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus at Nottingham Contemporary (2019–2020), Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now at the British Museum (2019–2020), Objects of Wonder, British Sculpture 1950s–Present, featuring works from the Tate collection, at the PalaisPopulaire, Berlin (2019).