FIGURES ON A GROUND

Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981, San Francisco, USA) uses painting, printmaking, photography and installations to explore the limits of our structures and logic systems (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities. Through her study of the fourth dimension, Auerbach combines order and disorder, readability and abstraction, permeability and solidity – concepts which are usually incompatible – within unified surfaces and volumes. Her series of weavings (Weave paintings), whose titles refer to scientific terms in physics, are made up of woven strips of canvas creating a deceptive, optical effect. What
may seem like a challenge to decipher the code behind weaving, quickly becomes an invitation to surrender to the strangeness and beauty of the forms in the way they weave back and forth. Each strip oscillates between a flat surface and three-dimensional object, between submission of the motif and chaos that can lead us to an experience close to the spiritual. Auerbach lives and works in New York, USA.

Sonia Kacem’s (b. 1985, Geneva, Switzerland) practice translates as research into the sculptural potential of unconventional materials – be they derived from quotidian life or from industrial manufacturers. Her almost performative method is inherently site-specific, inserting her works in space as fluid interventions on the tipping point between surface and volume, between artwork and architecture, between delineation and environment. Since 2010, she began working with heavy fabrics that can be draped freely or stretched over solid fixtures. Their outward presence in space generates sensual connotations, speaking to the bodily self-awareness of the spectator. Sonia Kacem produced the exhibited works during her residency at Fondation CAB, at the beginning of 2020. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

The practice of Claudia Comte (b. 1983, Morges, Switzerland) is informed by an unexpected duality between organic sensibilities and graphic aesthetics. She works as a sculptor, predominantly in wood and marble, recalling the smooth curves of Modernists such as Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth or Brancusi. Additionally, she has made a name for herself with her paintings, installations and exhibition designs which convey a sincere commitment to the line in various manifestations: morphed, repetitive and reminiscent of Op Art. Comte’s two dimensional works depict gradations of colours or monotonous and rhythmic lines, in graphic colour pallets reminiscent of the Swiss school. The
monumental zig zag mural at Fondation CAB shows the slow but steady transformation of a line. Underpinned by specific measurements and recurring mathematical formulas, the artist generates a controlled and totalised environment. She transforms the existing surroundings and leaves the visitor in a timeless and spaceless void, submerged in optical distortions. Baby Blue and Salmon Circle (Triangular painting) shows the artist’s dedication to hard-edge painting and geometric abstraction. The four elements of this modular piece can result in various spatial compositions, playing back and forth between volume and image.

Gloria Graham (b. 1940, Beaumont, Texas, USA) grew up along the coast of Texas, a place notoriously known for its many hurricanes. Together with the fact that her father was a botanist who managed a tree nursery, the artist’s youth was formative to her sense of belonging in the universe, and to her evident connection with nature. Her practice hovers between a spiritual awareness of a holistic universe, and scientific research – systems of knowledge that are not contradictory but rather reinforce each other. Many of her drawings depict the molecular structure of crystals and minerals: ancient matter that she considers to be embodying knowledge and strength. Graham
started working with kaolin and hide glue by the mid-eighties, and applied them directly onto wooden panels to then be covered with graphite drawings – a technique similar to that of Tibetan Buddhist thangka’s. In these works, Graham attempts to reveal the underlying physical structures of our environment. She renders the ephemeral tangible through precise, contained and concise gestures. Graham is based in New Mexico, USA.

The monumental paintings of Ann Edholm (b. 1953, Stockholm, Sweden) predominantly exist as parts of extended series in which she assembles various geometric abstract compositions. Her sharp and boldly coloured shapes serve to highlight the physicality of the canvas, as her works are intended to form a direct dialogue with the body of the spectator. « The body sees the image », says the artist. The image itself plays with optical perception, drawing the eye towards ambiguous vanishing points, and thus asserting its inherent quality of oscillating between being a flat object and a volume in space. Even though the works appear elementary graphical, their imagery is partially based on human experience and even contains cultural and symbolic references. By combining oil paint with wax, Edholm’s paintings interplay with the mysterious and immersive compositions that evoke a spiritual experience. She lives and works in Nyköping, Sweden.

Anna-Maria Bogner (b. 1984, Tyrol, Austria) expresses herself exclusively through the use of the line. Predominantly site-specific, her practice deploys the line as a physical entity to cut open, distort, slice through, penetrate and ‘free’ spaces. Her interventions don’t adorn or highlight what is there. Rather than a symbiosis, the artist seeks to resist the environments in which she operates. Bogner’s work positions itself towards typical Minimalist reflections regarding phenomenological readings of space. As opposed to the most typical potent and dominant volumes, which are meant to impress the human body, she works with thin and humble lines. However, her installations do not in any way evoke serenity and stillness, but rather dynamics and multitude, «a system of directions that shows in several dimensions. That also shows time» as described by Esther Stocker (2019). Through this practice of disruption, Bogner resists the hegemonic knowledge systems and singular truths, such as geometry and measurements, that reign over the spaces in which she operates. She lives and works between Düsseldorf and Vienna.

Mary Obering (b. 1937, Louisiana, USA) continues to produce works from her spacious studio that she moved into in the early seventies. Located in Soho, she quickly became included in the district’s burgeoning art community. Her practice is a self-proclaimed pursuit for simple and geometric forms. « I am attracted to pure abstract art because there is no subject matter per se. It’s all about the relationships of colours and shapes. » The artist has a background in psychology and behavioural science, which were formative to her art in the sense that «The scientific approach to life, and its impossibilities, led me to become an artist. » Her practice centres around exploring colour and space, and creating monochrome fields on canvas, which she cuts into horizontal and vertical panels that are then attached and layered onto larger monochrome backgrounds. Following travels to Italy in her teens, Obering became fascinated by Renaissance painting, which started to inform her work gradually and persistently. She introduced the use of egg tempera and gold leaf, which she applied directly to gessoed panels. Their opulence mimics the sacredness of altar pieces, allowing for a metaphysical sense of spirituality to surround her unique works.

Meg Webster (b. 1944, San Francisco, USA) has developed a unique approach to minimalism, rooted in environmental activism and Land Art. Her works bring nature and organic matter such as living plants, earth and water into the exhibition space, inspiring the viewer to consider the relationships between geometric and organic forms. In doing so, she often incorporates the cyclical rhythm of life and decay, resulting in works that function as encapsulated ecosystems that bear their own logic. A lot of research precedes this output, as she operates at the intersection of nature, human existence and technology. Alongside her interactive installations, Webster also makes numerous monumental sculptures in various materials. Copper Holding Form forms part of a continuous body of work of hollow containers, shaped to the scale of the artist’s body. Hinting at a ritualistic, solitary experience with raw material – warm, reflective and tactile copper – the work speaks of a unison of energies. Webster lives and works in New York.

Often considered one of the most important artists of Minimalism, Anne Truitt (b. 1921, Easton, USA – 2004, Washington, DC, USA) drew, painted and wrote, but is best known for her large wooden sculptures meticulously covered with many layers of paint. Her artistic practice started with welding figurative works for years, after working in psychology and nursing. Only by the 1960s did she start experimenting with abstraction, struggling for the next 30 years to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form. Throughout her artistic career, Truitt was associated with Minimalism. However, despite the strict reductive formal aesthetics to which she dedicated herself, her discourse differed crucially from Minimalist thought. As such, her quest for meaning was mostly ingrained in the research of colours, or as she stated « I’m not a sculptor, really … [I’m] trying to lift the colour up and set it free … [and] trying to get colour in three dimensions. » Truitt worked directly on wood or canvas, and painted in a labour-intensive process in which many thin, almost translucent layers of paint (sometimes up to forty) were applied on top of each other in alternating horizontal and vertical brushstrokes. The plain and simple hues of white deepened gradually under her meditative, ritualistic brushstrokes, generating a vast and expansive universe that invites you to get lost.

Belgian artist Ariane Loze (b. 1988, Brussels, Belgium) works with video, deconstructing and questioning her medium through self-reflexive gestures with its individual components. In her creational process, she performs the role of script-writer, actress, camerawoman, director, and is equally in charge of all post-production aspects. Her short videos are built on interior monologues and their paradoxal contradictions: she appears as various characters with sometimes opposing opinions, while the narrative unfolds. The spectator is left to make up their own story out of the basic principles of film editing: shot and counter-shot, the presumed continuity of movement, and the psychological suggestion of a narrative. The filming of these videos has been made public as an ongoing performance. In her video Minimal Art, she enhances the plurality of reflections on Minimalism, as documented in original 1970’s editions of ArtPress and L’Art Vivant. Staging the sculptural presence of Fondation CAB’s architecture, Loze contemplates on infinity, vastness, the fluidity of perception, and the intimacy of aesthetic experience and existential spirituality.

Considered a pivotal figure in the development of Minimalism, Agnes Martin (b. 1932, Saskatchewan, Canada – d. 2004, Taos, US) built her work around the quest for sublime beauty and serenity. Fine grids, bands and softly applied pale-coloured square blocks thread the emotion of abstract expressionism together with the purity and reductionism of minimalism. The square is an integral part of her work, both as the shape of her canvases and as a recurring motif. She drew lines in pencil by hand and worked subsequently in oil and acrylic on unprepared canvases. Disparate from any mechanical process and aesthetics, her works are characterised by subtle irregularities, caused by a shake of the hand or pressure from the ruler, animating her canvases with intense life and emotion. Influenced by the Taoist quest for balance and harmony, she stated in an interview with artist Ann Wilson in 1973: “Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this … that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature, an experience of simple joy … My paintings are about merging, about formlessness … A world without objects, without interruption.’’

Julia Mangold’s (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) black monoliths arise, weighty in scale but contained and serene, almost ascetic in presence. The artist works with geometric wooden volumes, which she composes intuitively: in this case the columns each comprise six rectangular elements. She often places her works grouped together, as though they occupy the space in an introverted and remote way, not necessarily there to grasp our attention. Her practice is characterised by a quest for proportion and spatial balance, seeking a unique interplay between scale, inanimate objects and human spectators. Slight variations on the same compositional ideas give her work rhythm and coherence. Pigments, lacquer and wax cover up the wooden surface in a trompe l’oeil, much like industrial-looking metal: opaque and enigmatic. Purists will see this as an iconoclastic gesture towards Minimalism – a term that only applies to works that do not hide the materials of which they are composed – although it is exactly the depth of her layered graphite-rubbed anthracite hues that allure to move oneself around the group of monoliths. The artist lives and works in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Motivated by a background in ceramics, Jessica Sanders (b. 1985, Arkansas, USA) has developed a unique practice in which she researches the malleability and physical reactions of the material she works with. She predominantly makes paintings by pouring hot beeswax over coloured linen, but also handles its derivatives and makes sculptures by layering the material in its different stages. Just as with clay, manipulating beeswax leaves room for chance, as it remains susceptible to environmental factors. In her Crumple-works, the beeswax namestakingly crumples during the drying process, leaving the surface with a crackled skin. This interplay between surface, texture, structure and transparency is what dominates Sander’s visual language, and what gives it its distinct corporeal feel. Her body of work oozes intimacy and softness, thanks to its fleshy tones, membrane-like translucence and the organic qualities. Sanders lives and works in New York, USA.

Charlotte Posenenske (b. 1930, Wiesbaden, Germany – d. 1985, Frankfurt, Germany) was a socially engaged and activist artist who introduced radical ideas on the democratisation of art to the Minimalist discourse. She shared principles on seriality; mass produced materials; and the non-hierarchical arrangement of objects with some of the most prominent Minimalists, but probed unprecedented questions on authorship by making endlessly reproducible fix-priced works, which are to be assembled freely by the ‘user’. The Vierkantrohre (“Square tubes”) Serie D and DW (1967), the latter presented here, further radicalise this research. The galvanized steel and cardboard modules are produced by a factory, their geometric shapes deduced from standardization logics. Exhibited for the first time in 1967 in Frankfurt by Paul Maenz and Peter Roehr, these modules were constantly rearranged during the opening. From factory production to layout, the artist wishes to directly involve all those concerned with the work, thus infusing minimalist sculpture with a performative dimension. The publication of her manifesto in a 1968 edition of Art International, marked her departure from the art world to take on sociology.

A desire for formal simplicity is at the forefront of Carmen Herrera’s (b. 1915, Havana, Cuba) painting, combined with a striking use of colour and a quest for the simplest of pictorial resolutions. In mastering clear lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera manages to infuse a curious interplay between symmetry and asymmetry, as well as movement, rhythm and a spatial awareness in her work. She conceptualizes her painting as an object and considers the structure of the canvas no longer as a surface on which one paints but as an object that is integrated by the environment that surrounds it. She thus creates compositions which are projected beyond the limits of the canvas, in space. La Fonteyn (2015) is a late example of her radical aesthetic: the green of the quadrilateral stands out from the black background and accentuates the geometry of the painting. Optimism and serenity emerge from the canvas and the shock of the two contrasting colours is both simple and powerful. It retains only the essential: the duality between two shapes and two colors. During the 1950’s, Herrera frequented the works of Ellsowrth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, the artists mostly mentioned when hard-edge painting is discussed. She refined her style simultaneously with them, though was discriminated and rejected by the art market for being foreign and female. Although considered a world-renowned artist, now at the age of 105, it was not until 2004 (when the artist was 89), that she sold her first painting. And it was only in 2016 that she had her first museum exhibition titled Lines of Sight, which took place at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York. Herrera lives and works in New York.

The thorough minimal practice of Marthe Wéry (b. 1930 – 2005, Brussels, Belgium) was informed by a continuous experimentation with materiality, light, texture and scale. She deconstructed the medium of painting in a way that was ahead of her time, by producing works with stripes in East-Indian ink, folded paper works, multi-panelled monochrome paintings and floor pieces. Wéry manipulated her carriers to incorporate space, and placed her works grouped together or in unconventional ways in space. The work on show is typical for the period subsequent to her exhibition in Venice in 1982, when she was invited to represent Belgium in its pavilion at the biennale. The artist made a site-specific work, which encompassed installation by combining smooth monochromes in various tones of the same colour with untreated wood panels in an architectural set-up. This urged her to experiment even more thoroughly with paint media, as she began submerging untreated panels of wood or aluminium directly in paint and pigment, after which they were dried naturally or manipulated with scrapers and brushes in order to generate a more dense texture. The seemingly disregarded character of this work, contrasts with its prudent and thoughtful presence, representative of Wéry’s ability to evoke intense physical experiences.

Affiliated with the Southern Californian Light and Space movement from the 1960s, Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, USA) has contributed to art history with a radical and inventive body of work. She reconfigured the relationship between the object and the body of the spectator by considering painting as a vehicle to research the perception of light. Controlled forms and strict geometric patterns were to be combined with experimental materials such as electric light, ceramic tiles and microspheres (reflective glass beads), in order to induce luminosity and radiance. Alluringly, her works take on various appearances depending on the viewer’s position. Though it is the delicate tension between her formal rationality, soft and cold hues and the apparent gestural brushwork that renders her work opulent, hypnotising and mysterious. Mary Corse lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.