Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Rebecca Ward of new paintings entitled, infinite plane, running from March 19 - April 30, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
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.
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, infinite plane, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, 2022
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).
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, infinite plane, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, 2022
"The laborious process of getting to that place of equilibrium is wrought with its own struggle and strife, and I think the result, minimal and pristine, connotes feelings both aesthetic and political – it allows for an emotional response. It is important that the result feels light and unburdened. The fact that the work contains these contradictions is what creates beauty."
— Rebecca Ward
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, 2017
"Rebecca Ward's work is wily and elusive; it doesn't sit still. As soon as you move, it moves, shifting what was once a static painting into an object with weight, shadow, and dimension."
— Jonathan Rider, "Seduction," Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, 2021
Installation view of Fresh Faces from The Rachofsky Collection, SITE131, Dallas, Texas, 2021
“Rebecca Ward plays with the materiality of the raw canvas itself. She removes either the warp or weft from her large canvases, leaving transparent negative spaces that reveal the wooden support behind in quietly elegant, minimalist compositions.”
— Rainey Knudson, “The Rachofsky Collection on View,” Paper City Magazine, 2021
Installation view of Rebecca Ward: indulgences, Exchiesetta, Polignano a Mare, Italy, 2015
"The thing that first struck me when I approached painting is that you are dealing with a very complex support system that has three dimensions. From the wall to the surface to the frame, different layers interact with each other. Therefore, I chose to reveal the support structure. The frame can dictate the work in a way that also acts in harmony with the painted surface. Transparency sensationalizes all this dimensionality and makes you question what you’re really looking at."
— Rebecca Ward
Installation view of Linear Abstraction, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, 2015
“The results are richly textured pieces, with the structural base frame exposed, affording the translucency and beauty of a stained-glass window.”
— Helena Lee, “Narrative Threads,” Harper’s Bazaar Art, 2015
Rebecca Ward's studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2022
"These works are created by unweaving, unraveling, and deconstructing fabric. Then it’s all re-stretched and re-stitched one thread at a time. It looks like a solid form, but it’s really a precarious situation. If you take a pair of scissors to even one string, all of the tension would be lost."
— Rebecca Ward
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, infinite plane, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, 2022
Installation view of Field of Vision, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY, 2021
“A painting is never just a painting, it’s all these other things: paint, a stretched surface, a frame, the wall behind it. There’s a lot going on there. Barthes talks about the very same idea when he mentions the flash. We are often missing the essence of why we are seduced. In this case, it’s the transparency that reveals everything and creates an eroticism.”
— Rebecca Ward
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, 2017
“…Ward's work explores age-old concepts like the interaction between space and architecture, while also addressing broader social concerns, such as the exploration of gender roles. The latter she achieves by employing techniques and materials conventionally associated with domesticity – for example the dyeing, sewing and bleaching of textiles – to achieve geometric abstraction, a traditionally male-dominated field of minimalism, thereby breaking the genre open with a distinctive female delicacy.”
— Giulia Mutti, “The Female Artist Subverting Male-Dominated Minimalism,” AnOther Magazine, 2015
Installation view of Space Between, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, 2015
“Ward’s meticulous approach to form, technique, and construction belies the fact that her forms themselves are fragile and unstable – just like the human body. Her exploration of materiality, abstraction, and in-between spaces, all work together to create the flash – the pivot between making and unmasking, stasis and mobility, solid and hollow – that ultimately seduces.”
— Jonathan Rider, "Seduction," Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, 2021
Installation view of Rebecca Ward, infinite plane, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, 2022
“I just naturally think of them as individual units of architecture. I’ve always called them paintings for convenience’s sake because they are regularly shaped objects that hang on a wall. And I think painting’s definition has grown to accommodate more than just paint on a flat canvas – depending on whom you ask. But I’m not really interested in having that argument about whether it’s a painting or a sculpture. It can be both.”
— Rebecca Ward
*All works are subject to availability; all prices are subject to change.
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