DEGREES OF ABSTRACTION

Tauba Auerbach

Tauba Auerbach’s interdisciplinary work asks us to consider the ways that structure, pattern, and gesture function at intricate and vast scales. Often testing the boundaries of rational systems such as language, logic, geometry, and physics, Auerbach (b. 1981, San Francisco) is driven by a curiosity about where these established principles break down or become subjective. Undermining what the artist calls the “habituated gaze,” the work contends with questions of what and how we perceive, exploring the existence of multidimensional space and the resonant capacity of certain shapes and forms.

Auerbach studies these ideas by manipulating them in drawings, sculptures, and paintings, employing them in custom-built production tools, and incorporating them into objects that can be lived with or worn. A continual student of new and traditional craft technologies, including weaving, marbling, glass working, and 3-D printing, the artist has a longstanding relationship with hand-lettering and calligraphy.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/tauba-auerbach-s-v-z/

Tauba Auerbach’s practice explores patterns of topology, symbology, and logic while making room for spontaneous slippages and optical interplay. Auerbach’s work—which spans painting, weaving, glasswork, photography, 3D printing, bookmaking, musical instrument design, and a painted boat—explores the poetic possibilities of structures and systems. The interplay of color, light, form, and negative space is another major concern.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/tauba-auerbach

tauba-auerbach-2022

Shadow Weave - Metamaterial/Hole, 2015, woven canvas on wooden stretcher, 152 × 114 cm.

Matthias Weischer

Matthias Weischer's works focus on uninhabited, enigmatic spaces and environments, suspended between a before and an after, between the disappearance and the silent expectation of human presence and happening. The rooms painted by the artist are thus half-empty, temporarily abandoned environments, stripped of elements of reality, places where the sense of waiting is amplified through the introduction of other spaces within the rooms, paintings and mirrors (thus images within images) frequently hanging on the walls of the rooms.

Weischer's works, moreover, are scores in which space is defined through a long process of layering, which gives the painting a vibrant material presence, like a sensitive skin that is also, inevitably, a dimension of time.

https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/matthias-weischer-stars-in-stanze-in-italy/

HOUSE-

House operates as an antilogy: a painting that’s a contradiction of its own expression. Subverting the expected qualities of painterly rendition, Matthias Weischer invents an environment where each element adopts attributes opposite to their character. Flowers in the foreground recede with the flatness of wallpaper, while rugged mountain backdrops protrude with stylised sharpness. Hard-edged formalist tower blocks exceed planate limitation to create believable sculptural volume, while details nearest in perspective float in non-descriptive nether-space. Smudges and drips of pure abstract gesture should lead the eye directly back to the painting’s surface; instead they create a disorienting tiered perspective. Matthias Weischer creates a common urban scene as a surprise of improbable construction, exploiting illusion to its ultimate possibility.

https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/matthias_weischer

Mimei Thompson

In Mimei Thompson’s paintings the reality of everyday images shifts in and out of focus; from vegetables, insects, animals, minerals and landscapes – everything has an unquestionably alien and hallucinatory appearance. She is a Tokyo-born British oil painter interested in the fluidity of movement and shifting between the unconscious, myths, dreams and what seems to be mundane. Her pictures juxtapose the grandiose and the banal, conventional with obscure finding inspiration in Max Ernst's surrealism.

The paintings go through a liquid stage, where the whole surface is covered in a fluid mix of paint and Liquid medium on a smooth, non-absorbent surface, and that gets moved around and worked into while it’s all still liquid. The estranging effect comes from the visibility of the dominant brushstroke on her characteristic luminous white, pale grey-green or lilac-pink backgrounds. Exploring the way the ordinary becomes fantastic, Thompson inherits this fundamental dichotomy to her process of painting – showing how images levitate between the edge of growth and exaggeratedly visible brushstrokes.

https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/mimei-thompson

in 2015 you can buy the canvas from the artist

Mimei Thompson - Chainlink fence, 2013

Jadé Fadojutimi

We are all beauty, and that is what is encapsulated by the word life.
—Jadé Fadojutimi

In her paintings, which are often monumental in scale, Jadé Fadojutimi orchestrates color, space, line, and movement in the service of fluid emotion and the quest for self-knowledge. She interprets everyday experience in ways that reflect a drive to understand more completely the perpetually intertwined ideas of identity and beauty

Making use of key visual elements from twentieth-century painting such as grids, layers, and disparate marks, Fadojutimi conjures a sense of continual transformation. Her compositions can suggest plants, microbes, or marine landscapes, but edge consistently toward abstraction. Described by the artist as “environments,” these complex arrangements are built up with layers of oil paint, sometimes interrupted by lines of oil pastel. Fadojutimi also combines elements of clothing—swatches of fabric and the shapes of stockings and bows—with ambiguous outlines to reflect the trauma of displacement.

Fadojutimi draws inspiration from specific locations, cultures, objects, and sounds, especially Japanese anime, clothing, and soundtracks (she traveled to Japan after graduating from the Slade, then again for a residency in 2016, and now returns to the country several times a year). Writing, too, is key to her process—sometimes she uses it to help articulate the subtleties of her painting; at other times she positions it in parallel to the visual by adopting a more poetic approach. For Fadojutimi, her roles as artist and writer are equally important aspects of her creative practice.

https://gagosian.com/artists/jade-fadojutimi/

DT: At first glance, your paintings appear wholly abstract but they have figurative elements hidden within them. Can you talk about the tension between figuration and abstraction in your work?
JF: I see abstraction and figuration as opposite ends of the same spectrum and each work has its own place on that spectrum. My paintings derive their shapes, colours and patterns from clothing, anime, video games, soundtracks, childhood obsessions, memories, drawings, traumas, experiences and objects I have collected along the way. They are woven together into emotive environments that breed characters and forms. There are moments in some works that can be described as deliberate, but they are not preplanned; forms reveal themselves during the process of making. It's stimulating exposing the subtleties of organic forms found along the process of painting and I relish manipulating their malleability, carrying them in and out of focus, making their recognition fragile. It lures in another veil of questioning, another ingredient for an already complex subject. I welcome an open-ended discussion with everything that gratifies me, in a hope to reveal the qualities that truly indulge me. My paintings thrive on isolating these indulgences and obsessing over them.

https://www.studiointernational.com/jade-fadojutimi-interview

Painting takes me over – like witchcraft': Jadé Fadojutimi, art's hottest property | Art | The Guardian

I Present Your Royal Highness, 2018. Photograph: Jadé Fadojutimi

Independent Research

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.

https://www.whitecube.com/artists/tracey-emin

Her oeuvre spans drawings, tapestries, embroidery, film, bronze sculptures, neon signs and wooden constructions. She is known by many for her giant tapestries with honest and provocative words sewn onto them.

What would you say is the measure of true art?

'It should make people look at life differently. Like, the first time I went to the Tate I was 22 and I really only liked figurative Expressionist paintings – that’s where I was. I came across a pink-and-yellow painting by Rothko.3

And I looked at it, and I sat down and looked at it and I started really welling up inside and I cried. I didn’t know anything about Rothko, I didn’t like abstract painting, I certainly wasn’t into insipid colours like pale pink and wishy-washy yellow – I liked black and red. But this painting had this really strong effect on me.

It was later that I looked up Rothko and discovered that he was devoutly religious and then did all the figurative work and then all the abstract work and then committed suicide. Hey presto! I had felt it looking at this painting. And I thought, ‘Wow! That’s almost like magic, that I could feel that from looking at that work without knowing anything about him.’ And that’s what art should do'.

Whether it be her 18.2 tonne or nine metre high bronze, The Mother – as recently installed outside the Munch Museum in Oslo – or an intimate watercolour drawing, Emin’s works holds so much power. They are alive with energy and have the ability to send us to places that resonate, that make us feel, that are somehow incredibly familiar, but make us question so much. Just as she has said, “True art should resonate. It should make you feel it's not a picture. It's not a thing. It's not an object. It is a true thing that has energy. That's what makes it art.”

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tracey-emin/id1480259187?i=1000581608661

A Fortnight of Tears – a powerful show of new work by Tracey Emin at the White Cube Bermondsey in London – opens with a trio of saint-like figures, each portraying the nature of their martyrdom. Shown along one wall, they form a triptych of loss: figures enduring the agonies of heartbreak, bereavement and reproductive trauma.

To the left, I Watched You Disappear. Pink Ghost is veal pale, a sketchy suggestion of a figure, diluted, weakened and fading at the edges as if dissolved by tears.

In the centre, I Was Too Young to be Carrying Your Ashes is hot, weighty and furious, flooded with thick red and black paint pushed hard into the canvas.

The last, You Were Still There, is painted face-on, a woman etiolated and floating in the depths of the canvas like a Giacometti painting, her head crowned with the suggestion of a halo, her belly darkened by the roiling suggestion of a living thing within.

The watery title is apt for a show that finds Emin exploiting paint’s liquid nature to painful, visceral ends. In And So It Felt Like This, the spare details of a female figure are deftly sketched with fine blue lines on to a whitish background pulsing with suggested, shadowy figures. In the gap between her legs is a triangle of paint the colour of dried blood, applied crudely with a wide brush, and so wet that it gushes down the canvas as though cascading from an open wound.

That fat, paint-laden brush is used more violently in other paintings, where – armed with indigo, black and shit brown – it masks horrors we’re not allowed to see.

For, as Emin’s art reminds us, emotional responses are seldom neat and compartmentalised. The pain experienced on the death of a parent is not sealed off and separate from the pain of a disintegrating relationship, or the pain that wells when you remember the child you didn’t and can never have. These feelings flood chaotically and confusingly together.

Tracey Emin review – brutal portraits of female pain | Tracey Emin | The Guardian Tracey Emin Limited Edition I never asked to fall in Love Tracey-Emin-Is-Nothing-Sacred-2023-medium-res-1200x1473.jpg?resize=780%2C957&quality=100&ssl=1

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1. I Watched You Disappear. Pink Ghost; I Was Too Young to be Carrying Your Ashes; and You Were Still There.

2. I Never asked to fall in Love

3. Is Nothing Sacred (2023)

Research

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