Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Rebecca Ward of new paintings entitled, infinite plane. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception at 176 Grand Street, New York on Saturday, March 19, 2022, from 1-6pm. The exhibition runs through April 30, 2022.
Rebecca Ward continues to investigate painting’s multifaceted relationships with object, craft, and dimensionality through deconstructed and sewn canvases. In the exhibition’s new series of polychromatic horizontal paintings, formal elements emerge from Ward’s recent investigations into geometry, landscape, and the body. Emphasizing materiality and process, a distinct visual language and formal ambiguity permeates the artist’s works. Ward has expanded her vernacular to include curving 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 ranging from geometry textbooks and celestial maps to Albrecht Dürer’s anatomical graphs and her own recent experience with pregnancy and childbirth. These elements coalesce into a spatial play of harmonious proportions and tones that suggest the mirroring of human and natural phenomena.
Ward converges cut planes of painted and dyed canvas at machine-sewn seams that both physically combine and divide the compositions along a perpendicular axis. 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 at the bottom of 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. When installed together within the exhibition, the paintings create an overall panoramic effect, while each composition individually asserts its own unique internal logic and character.
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 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).
