Installation view of Aphasia at Ronchini Gallery, London, 2015
Rebecca Ward Makes Her Mark on Minimalism at Ronchini
Mark Beech
October 18, 2015
Rebecca Ward is further developing her art as she makes her mark on the male-dominated field of abstract minimalism.
The Brooklyn-based artist’s largest show to date, her second at London’s Ronchini gallery, is deceptively simple.
While her stretched-fabric structures have basic forms from a distance, such as rectangles and X shapes, at close quarters it is clear that some have been painstakingly deconstructed, thread by thread. The artist then reconstructs them by stitching panels together. The flat work becomes a three-dimensional sculptural object
While ward’s influences include Post-War Italian Art and Arte Povera, her style diverts from the likes of Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases. She uses techniques associated with home crafts such as dyeing, weaving, patching, and sewing. Ward sees herself as making feminist statements by this use of domestic activities often associated with women. Dark-wood frames are visible through diaphanous silk. Inn other works, oil painted stripes in geometric patterns are fragmented across the image.
Ward, born in Waco, Texas, in 1984, has made installations for Stella McCartney’s New York SoHo shop and was also in residence at Alighiero Boetti’s former studio in Umbria, creating work for a show with Italian painter Carla Accardi, who died last year.