LONDON.- Ronchini Gallery presents its second solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Rebecca Ward, who joined the gallery in 2012. The exhibition, titled aphasia, features a series of new work and coincides with Frieze London. Ward’s paintings and bold installations use colour and space to explore abstraction.
Influenced by Minimalism, Abstract Art, Post-War Italian Art and Arte Povera, Ward uses the language of abstract painting to explore the canvas as a 3D object. She infiltrates the historically male-dominated field of minimalism and geometric abstraction by using materials and processes long associated with femininity and domesticity such as dyeing, weaving, sewing, textiles and bleaching. Through the iconography of feminine gesture, the work subtly addresses broader social concerns.
Ward has become known for her series of paintings where parts of the canvas are meticulously deconstructed one thread at a time and reconstructed by stitching panels together. The works explore the emotive and expressive power of art through the use of colour palettes that evoke memory and sentiment. In her X series, viewers experience the painting as a multidimensional object. Painted, but translucent, silk interrupted with horizontal lines creates a surface that allows the structural ‘X’ of the dark wood stretcher bar underneath to be visible.
In further works, Ward continues to express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new manner. Across canvas panels sewn together, monochrome oil paint stripes form regular geometric patterns that investigate the relationship between the painted surface and its base.
Rebecca Ward (b. 1984, Waco, Texas, USA) received her BA in Fine Arts from University of Texas in 2006, and an MFA in Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts, New York in 2012. Museum solo exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Raleigh. Solo exhibitions include: Exchiesetta, Polignano a Mare, Puglia (forthcoming - July 2015); Artgenève, Luxembourg & Dayan, Geneva (2015), UNTITLED, Ronchini Gallery, Miami (2014); cow tipping, Ronchini Gallery, London (2013); shucked & silked, Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston (2013); East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, New York (2013); Carla Accardi/Rebecca Ward, Bibo’s Place, Todi, Italy (2013). Recent group exhibitions include: Space Between, The Flag Art Foundation, New York (2015); Post-Analog Painting, The Hole, New York (2015); Linear Abstraction, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah (2015); January, Mixed Greens, New York (2015); All That Matters is What’s Left Behind, Ronchini Gallery, London (2014); The Shaped Canvas, Revisited, Luxembourg & Dayan, New York (2014); Material Images, Vogt Gallery, New York, (2014), Maurizio Cattelan’s The Virgins, curated by Marilyn Minter, Family Business, New York (2012); and Post-Op, Mixed Greens Gallery, New York (2012).
