THEN AND NOW

Since the beginning of her career, Bridget Riley (b. 1931) has constantly redefined the concept of abstraction and its possibilities for the painterly process. Aware of how individual and collective experiences taint one’s vision of the world, the artist creates works that free colour and form from their illustrative potential, enabling what she refers to as “pure sight”. Riley develops paintings through the accumulation and distribution of simple forms—vertical and horizontal stripes, squares, circles and ovals, triangles, rhomboids, and curves—coming together into complex arrangements fostering a sense of dynamism, and rhythm. Her paintings seem to flicker and pulsate. Riley’s profound observations of movement, light and colour have given rise to a complex and continuously evolving oeuvre that underlies a long-standing fascination for the physical process of perception.

“[...] The surprise of the first encounter with one of her paintings is owing to an astonishment that an inanimate object has apparently come to life and – more than that – is in communion with the viewer. The viewer’s surprise is, we recognise, is a self-created surprise. Perception is the medium just as much as is the canvas and the paint – more so, in that a painting, the artist acknowledges, ‘only comes to life when looked at from a certain distance’. In a way, it doesn’t exist factually at all; only in the viewer’s perception.”

– John Elderfield

Edmund de Waal’s (b. 1964) work addresses, among others, the subjects of collecting - archiving and including - removing. Recognised as an exceptional ceramist, Edmund de Waal models small unique vessels that form the base of his installations. Carefully composed vitrines create a visual narration and result in a subtle dialogue between tradition and modernity, minimalism and architecture, ideas of repetition and rhythm, informed by his passions for literature as well as music and suitable for meditative contemplation.

“I work with things. […] And then I arrange them, find places to put them down, on shelves or within vitrines, in houses and galleries and museums, move them around so that they are in light or in shadow. They are installations, or groupings, or a kind of poetry. They have titles, a phrase or a line that helps them on their way in the world.”

— Edmund de Waal

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) makes sculptures in a variety of materials including clay, bronze, steel and neon. The artist also creates collages and wall mounted vitrines using assemblages of objects she has collected. Warren says about her work that “it comes from a strange nowhere, then gradually something comes out into the light. There are impulses, half-seen shapes, things that might have stuck with you from decades ago, as well as more recently. It’s all stuff in the world going through you as a filter …”

“To say that Rebecca Warren’s sculptures are always extremely tactile seems like an understatement. They offer themselves as hybrids between unwrought form, symbolic informe, and transmitter, an object triggering an entire chain of associations with lofty and lowly forerunners or reproductions, whether drawn from antiquity or from the artistic and non-artistic canons. Seething before our eyes is cultural primal matter, in which the hand of the artist at times seems to play simply the role of catalyst, while the elements fuse themselves together.”

Bice Curiger, ‘In all things a song lies sleeping’, in Rebecca Warren – Every Aspect of Bitch Magic, London: Fuel Publishing, 2012, p. 13