THEN AND NOW

Bridget Riley may be best known for her analysis of optical phenomena in geometrical black and white paintings that define her starting point and made her one of the central figures in the Op art movement of the 60’s. In the stunning colour work that followed, she continued her exploration of perception through the relationship between structure and colour, always causing disorientation to the viewer’s eye, as her paintings seem to flicker, to pulsate and to convey an internal life. Bridget Riley, continuously carrying out new experiments, created her first wall painting in 2007. Besides her artistic practice, her theoretical writings had a considerable influence on a younger generation of artists.

"To follow very closely Riley’s work is to see that sameness is courted – because repetition is crucial to an artistic practice – but sameness is also avoided, because it is in the character of a true artistic practice to create change. So, to follow her work is to see that the continuity of artistic identity is asserted, not despite change, but because of change: because change is the very means of achieving continuity. [...] 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, Creating a way of looking in Bridget Riley: Die Streifenbilder / The Stripe Paintings 1961-2012, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications and Ridinghouse, 2013

Edmund de Waal's 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.

"One of the most profound explanations of what a pot, a vessel of fired clay, represents as an object in the world was expressed by Philip Rawson in his classic, Ceramics: 'A pot thus “contains” both the reality of materials and process, and the inner realities of man´s sense of identity in relation to his own world of meaning.' It has been de Waal´s achievement to find in the making of his vessels an inexhaustible means of exploring both the most intellectually ambitious ideas and the most elusive and subjective thoughts and feelings."

Emma Crichton-Miller, Can a Poet be a Potter of Song? in Edmund de Waal, Phaidon, 2014

Rebecca Warren is a sculptor of more or less figurative, more or less expressive forms in clay, bronze and welded steel, and an orchestrator of fragments displayed often but not exclusively within wall-mounted vitrines. She works with an eye to extremes – monstrous excess, alarming paucity – creating a variety of objects that she describes as existing "somewhere on the continuum between pure fleshiness and pure cartoonishness". Hers is a restless, sometimes contradictory art, the result of sustained contemplation of the creative impulse and the mysterious potency of images and objects.

"This experimental, slapstick collision of Giacometti and Disney, literally cast or pressed into one physical body, leaves neither unharmed. In fact Warren's sculpture could be read as a response to culturally entrenched gender tropes - the slender modernist outline on one hand, and the Disneyish codification of cuteness and effervescence on the other hand - colliding in the real world, in real people's lives. Think of the late Amy Winehouse: big breast implants and anorexia. Warren does not merely make illustrative comments by pitting two things against each other, however. There is more at play. Sticking two things together that "don't fit" is just one possible method. Another is to duplicate (while twisting the logic of duplication); another, to alter proportion (elongate, squeeze etc.). And yet another is to use materials and conventions in unconventional ways. Think of Winehouse again: the postmodern mixture of visual styles and the clear modernism of Soul music."

Jörg Heiser, Bronze Heads and Hair Bows in Rebecca Warren, Galerie Max Hetzler, Holzwarth Publications, 2012