Rebecca Ward continues to investigate painting’s multifaceted relationships with object, craft, and dimensionality primarily through deconstructed and sewn canvases. Emphasizing materiality and process, a distinct visual language and formal ambiguity permeates the artist’s works. Ward has expanded her vernacular to include curved and organic forms alongside the hard-edged. Although not direct depictions, she connects abstraction to both the corporeal and the mathematical, with diverse sources of inspiration. These elements coalesce into a spatial play of harmonious proportions and tones that suggest the mirroring of human and natural phenomena. She converges cut planes of painted and dyed canvas at machine-sewn seams that both physically combine and divide the compositions. Creating exuberant environments of grassy greens, silky violets, or variegated maroons, foreground and background are accentuated by lighter washes or raw canvas contrasting with saturated tones. These sections give way to an unraveling of the overall picture in the paintings where she methodically removes sections of horizontal threads. Revealing and obscuring the underlying stretcher bars, Ward emphasizes the multidimensional structure of painting beyond its surface and highlights the structural elements that make it possible.
Rebecca Ward (b. 1984, Waco, TX) earned a BA at the University of Texas, Austin, TX (2006) and an MFA at the School of the Visual Arts, New York, NY (2012). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Museum exhibitions include upcoming Rebecca Ward: distance to venus, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2022); Fresh Faces from the Rachofsky Collection, Site 131, Dallas, TX (2021); Over & Over, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2017); Eastwing Biennial: Artificial Realities, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK (2016); Making & Unmaking, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2016); The Tim Sayer Bequest, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK (2016); Space Between, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Linear Abstraction, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA (2015); and Rebecca Ward: indulgences, Exchiesetta, Polignano a Mare, Italy (2015). Ward is the subject of a monograph of her exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021). Residencies include Shandaken: Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2016); and Atelier Alighiero Boetti, Todi, Italy (2013).
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