Situation grew out of an idea of the artist Frank Avray Wilson, one of the three founders of the New Vision Centre Gallery in 1956, who proposed a large non-figurative show of artists either rated by Alloway or who exhibited at the Drian Gallery in Marble Arch. Alloway became the lynchpin of the project because of his network of contacts, and the authority brought about by his ICA track record of exhibitions and the publication of Nine Abstract Artists. Sally Bulgin describes how Alloway's

Greenberg's advice regularly to visit studios had obviously had an impact. The idea of a show picked up momentum when the Redfern Gallery cancelled their 1960 exhibition of artists from the Young Contemporaries. It was decided to extend the Alloway-Coleman pairing into a collective: the executive committee comprised Alloway as chairman; Coleman, who wrote the catalogue introduction; and the artists Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, Gordon House, Henry Mundy, Hugh Shaw, and William Turnbull. The RBA Galleries in Suffolk Street were available during September 1960. The idea of a collective did have genuine relevance: the organizers were not connected to the gallery but were organizing an exhibition from their own resources, “born out of a professional feeling that, simply, there was a neglected body of work which lacked a clear channel to the public.” Others expressed this aspect more forcibly. Denny admitted hoping that Situation would help to enable artists to be “independent of all the normal channels for exhibiting or informing, allowing the development of a more rigorous and independent creative discipline.” For Turnbull and Plumb, “it was an attempt to show that established critics, dealers, and museums need not be left to shape art values.”