The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - "The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers" Exhibition

The Sum of the Parts

The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Until 29 August 2025

Josef Albers 

Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962 

The complete portfolio of 10 screenprints 

Paper and Image each: 43 x 43 cm (each) 

Edition of 250 

Photo courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the first exhibition dedicated to all of the print portfolios made by Josef Albers.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers, features eighteen portfolios using lithography, silkscreen, inkless intaglio and embossing. The portfolios made over a period of 14 years which are increasingly rare to see in their complete form, is each a powerful demonstration of how markedly original Albers was in his understanding of colour and line.

Josef Albers (1888 - 1976), was one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century, creating seminal works in painting, stained glass, and furniture.  He was also a dedicated printmaker who produced work in a variety of print techniques right up until his death in 1976. His complete graphic oeuvre comprises some 350 editions. In printmaking, Josef Albers found the perfect vehicle with which to realize the full array of his imagery and to develop his theoretical approach to colour.

Josef Albers made his first suite in 1962, Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers. It was the first time he explored his Homage to the Square painted imagery in a series of prints. Using an array of solid, unmodulated colours, the viewer is invited to perceive shifting depth and change of tone in multiple works at once.

Josef Albers went on to produce more sets, which each take a particular compositional theme, which is then explored through variations of tone, colour and line. Midnight and Noon, 1964, brings together two opposing colour sets, printed in different densities, in a single portfolio. In Soft Edge-Hard Edge, 1965, edges define forms but then begin to disappear before your eyes, creating a conflict between what is precise and what is an illusion. White Line Squares, 1966, features colours registered side by side, delineated by a single white line. The addition of this precise line creates the appearance of four colours, although only three inks are used. 

In the early 1970s Josef Albers spent almost two years making Formulation: Articulation, 1972, a set of two boxed portfolios each containing 66 sheets of paper screenprinted with imagery from every decade of his career, from the Bauhaus period to early woodcuts, pre-Columbian influences and his Homage to the Square explorations. 

A realisation of the essential ideas in Albers’ works, Formulation: Articulation demonstrates the visual and material connections that drove the artist’s practice over the preceding forty years.

Arguably two of Josef Albers most important works in any medium, are the portfolios Gray Instrumentation I and II, made in 1974-75. Together they are the ultimate expression of Albers theoretical approach to colour. The basis for each work is the interactions between different shades of grey. This exploration by Josef Albers was prompted by seeing black and white photos of his Homage to the Square paintings.

In previous portfolios colours were typically printed on top of one another. However, the inks used in Gray Instrumentation I and II, were applied adjacently without overlapping, a level of precision that had not been seen in screenprinting before and a process more closely aligned with Josef Albers painting. Nick Fox Weber, Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, states “As a totality, the twenty-four prints that comprise these two portfolios are in many ways Albers’s ultimate masterpiece.”

Still driven by his need and desire to discover colour relationships beyond anything in his previous work, Josef Albers made Never Before in 1976, which developed upon ideas he had started exploring over twenty-five years earlier in painting. The portfolio was completed, but Josef Albers was too unwell to complete signing each work. As a result a number of prints remain unsigned.

David Cleaton-Roberts, Gallery Director explains, “At the time of his death, he had just completed the series aptly titled Never Before. While artists creating works in series is not unique to printmaking, the ability to formulate, develop, and present an idea through multiple images, tied together by an underlying ethos and/or medium was perfectly realised by Albers using techniques that simultaneously allowed for multiplicity, repetition, and variation.”

The individual plates that make up each portfolio in this exhibition challenge or echo one another, support or oppose one another, but when viewed together, the visual perception and interpretation achieved demonstrates that the whole is always much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Sum of the Parts: The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers is accompanied by a 144-page fully illustrated hard-back publication. Featuring texts by Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and David Cleaton-Roberts, a senior director of Cristea Roberts Gallery.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

The Sum of the Parts. The Complete Portfolios of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 12 June - 29 August 2025

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming?

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

2 May – 8 June 2025

MARIE HARNETT

Half agony, half hope, 2024

Graphite on drafting film

Paper: 23 x 30.6 cm / Image: 5.2 x 16.6 cm

© Marie Harnett, courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery

“What could she say, but that too well he lov’d?”

Ovid, Orpheus, Metamorphoses

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of new drawings by MARIE HARNETT (b.1983). Were you dreaming?, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, brings together twenty-five intricate works on paper depicting tender, decadent and dream-like scenes inspired by contemporary film, Greek mythology and Old Master paintings.

Best-known for pencil drawings that are hyper realistic in style, the artist’s practice always begins with film stills sourced from a diverse range of trailers. Films are a conduit for the artist, who sifts through hundreds of trailers, intuitively selecting certain frames that encapsulate a particular atmosphere.

Through this process, Marie Harnett establishes a series of fragmented scenes that allude to classical myth and tragedy; the artist was particularly inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers separated by death. Although Orpheus persuades Hades, God of the Dead, to allow him to take Eurydice back to the world of the living, he inevitably breaks the terms of their agreement, stealing a final, forbidden glance at Eurydice, causing her to return to the underworld forever.

Harnett’s tableaux of drawings collectively inhabit the same world, forming part of a new narrative, a realm that is not quite our own; a woman is framed in a window, a coin held between her fingers; a man holds the head of a broken statue in his hands; the façade of a building is concealed by thick foliage.

The artist commits these unexpected scenes to paper, imbuing her drawings with drama and suspense. As a result, visitors to the exhibition, become active protagonists, joining into the act of observing and being observed.

Marie Harnett pairs the ancient with the modern, creating what she describes as an “other world, an underworld, a mirror world, that is frozen in time.”

Harnett’s use of graphite collaging in her drawings produces images that are surreal and uncanny; characters from period films are blended and recontextualised with backgrounds sourced from mythological paintings. In for you alone, 2024, a man in modern dress is transposed into the landscape of Orpheus, 1628, by Roelandt Savery.

Drawing inspiration from Baroque and Renaissance sculptors, such as Bernini and Michelangelo, several of the artist’s works, including Half agony, half hope, 2024, depict marble statues that appear in film. Interested by how stone sculptures depict subjects that are seemingly suspended in time, Harnett experiments with the medium of pencil to create the same illusion.

Marie Harnett also presents several drawings that take the form of photographs; in Love has an earlier death, and You’ve cast a spell, 2024, a jelly-like trifle is shown in both positive and negative versions. In these drawings, Harnett experiments with transformation; a film still of a particular object is turned into a photographic negative which, in turn, is made into a drawing. Through this method, Marie Harnett intends to highlight the sculptural quality of drawing, to establish distorted parallels in shades of light and dark.

Harnett’s titles are selected from the audio of the trailers she watches. Through this pairing of image and word Marie Harnett creates a new staging and cast of characters, all connected to pervading themes of loss, love, yearning and grief.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an interview with the artist.

Marie Harnett: Were you dreaming? takes place during the 2025 edition of London Gallery Weekend (5 - 8 June 2025), when the artist will be giving a public talk and the show will be open for extended hours.

MARIE HARNETT

Marie Harnett was born in 1983 in Hertfordshire, England. She studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2006.

Marie Harnett makes highly detailed, meticulous drawings derived from film stills which capture fleeting moments of drama, beauty and suspense. By removing the stills from their context and reworking them as intricate pencil studies, Harnett focuses on every aspect of pose, light and texture. Harnett also explores these themes in her printmaking, which include large scale linocut prints of images built up from black and white curving lines, which can take up to one month to carve, and a series of mezzotints, which are housed in the permanent collection of the British Museum, London.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include The British Museum, London; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2022); Cristea Roberts Gallery, London (2021, 2017); BcmA, Berlin (2020); Städtische Galerie, Bietigheim-Bissingen; Haugesund Museum of Fine Art, Haugesund (2019); Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut (2017); Theodore: Art, New York, USA (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023, 2018, 2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); Bremen Kunsthalle, Bremen (2015) and Galleria Bonomo, Rome (2014). In 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut.

Harnett’s works are held in international public and private collections including British Museum, London; National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection, London; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Marie Harnett lives and works in London.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

Richard Serra: The Final Works @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Richard Serra

The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Until 26 April 2025

RICHARD SERRA

Casablanca #3, 2022

Hand-applied oil stick, etching ink and silica 

on Igarashi 430gsm handmade paper

Paper and Image: 167.9 x 152.9 cm - 66 1/8 x 60 1/4 inches. 

Edition of 27

© Richard Serra. Courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Marking the first anniversary of Richard Serra’s death at the age of 85, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents the final works made by the artist.

The first complete showing of these works outside the US focuses on two series of prints made using black oil stick. Serra, one of the most significant artists of his generation, was known for monumental steel sculptures. However, his explorations of form, mass and gravity informed every aspect of his art, including his works on paper.

Casablanca 1-6, 2022 and Hitchcock I-III, 2024 mark the culmination of over fifty years of printmaking. Although described as prints, none of these works passed through a press and the methods used are unlike those of traditional printmaking; Serra’s chosen media undermines our understanding of what constitutes an editioned work.

Each work was made using oil stick, a combination of pigment, linseed oil, and melted wax. The mixture was moulded into large cylindrical sticks, then pressed down into a meat grinder and blended in an industrial dough mixer with silica.

The mixture was applied in layers, by a gloved hand, directly onto handmade paper, pushing and rubbing in a downward direction. Each layer required weeks of drying time before an additional coat could be applied. As a result, each impression varies in its construction.

For each work, layer upon layer of black oil stick was built up so that an intensely textured and rich three-dimensional surface emerges, evoking a large void. This imposing effect of black absorbing and reflecting light, dominates Serra’s prints. When making works on paper Serra remained committed to using a single palette of black to investigate weight, stability, and density. 

Richard Serra commented “Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging.”

The mass of black in each work, which almost fills the entire sheets in Casablanca and Hitchcock, is relieved by thin areas of paper that appear to rise or emerge from curved edges and corners. Serra examines tension and gravity through this unequal balance of heavy mass and handmade Japanese paper. The paper support almost appears precarious; each impression of Casablanca, measuring over 150cm in width, weighs nearly 10 kilograms.

Richard Serra was interested in how an artwork not only exists in space but reorientates it. His sculptures created environments that had to be walked through or around to be fully experienced. Serra’s printmaking extends these investigations, interrogating the physical relationship of mass and the flat surface, and the viewers relationship to it.

The exhibition also features examples of earlier uses of black oil stick and etchings by the artist dating from 2004, and a display of the tools used to create these groundbreaking works.

Richard Serra: The Final Works demonstrates how the artist’s radical techniques and exceptional approach to making editions, remains singular in the history of printmaking.

Since presenting the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Serra’s prints in 2013, Cristea Roberts Gallery has continued to exclusively exhibit the artist’s editions in Europe. The works on show were developed by Richard Serra with Gemini G.E.L., an artists’ workshop and publisher in Los Angeles, where Serra made all his editions, a collaboration that lasted for over fifty years.

RICHARD SERRA - BRIOGRAPHY

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024) was born in San Francisco, USA. He lived and worked in New York, and the North Fork of Long Island, and Nova Scotia. From 1957 to 1961 Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and from 1961 to 1964 at Yale University, Connecticut, where he worked with Josef Albers on Albers seminal book, Interaction of Color (New Haven, 1963). His first solo exhibition was held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966 and the Pasadena Art Museum staged his first solo museum exhibition in 1970.

Serra’s large-scale, site-specific sculptures, featuring monumental arcs, spirals, and ellipses can be found all over the world. Selected solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Menil Collection, Houston (2011); Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2008); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (2004); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2003). His works are housed in major collections all over the world.

 

Richard Serra participated in international exhibitions including Documenta, Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987); the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1968, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1995, and 2006).

Richard Serra was the recipient of many notable prizes and awards. In 2015, he was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France, and in 2018 he received the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts. Prior to this he was also awarded Orden de las Artes y las Letras de España, Spain in 2008 and Orden pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Federal Republic of Germany in 2002.

Richard Serra passed away aged 85 on 26 March 2024 in New York, USA.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON 

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

www.cristearoberts.com 

Related Posts:

In English

Richard Serra: Every Which Way, David Zwirner, New York, November 7 – December 14, 2024

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13 – August 28, 2011

Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, September 25, 1997 - June 14, 1998

En Français

Richard Serra : Casablanca, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, 14 mars - 30 avril 2024

Richard Serra : Clara Clara, 1983 , Musée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 14 avril – 3 novembre 2008

Richard Serra: The Final Works

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 13 March - 26 April 2025

Artist Paul Winstanley Exhibition @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - "Reprise"

Paul Winstanley: Reprise 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

7 June - 27 July 2024

PAUL WINSTANLEY

Painted Alp 4., 2024 

116.4 x 78 cm. Edition of 6 

© Paul Winstanley, courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents Reprise, an exhibition of new prints and paintings by PAUL WINSTANLEY (b. 1954). Best-known for photorealistic paintings of liminal and transitory spaces, Paul Winstanley’s new body of work re-invents early nineteenth-century paintings of mountainous landscapes.

Paul Winstanley’s new work marks a departure from his previous depictions of empty interiors, such as art school studios, modernist corridors and waiting rooms, to appropriate existing paintings of nature. Interested by the aesthetics of the sublime, which inspired artists and writers from the seventeenth century onwards, Paul Winstanley explores how pictures mythologise reality.

For Reprise, Paul Winstanley appropriates images of existing historical paintings depicting Alpine landscapes of mountains, trees and rushing water and, using processes of wax resist, degrades the images, impacting their perfection and historical authenticity.

“...how you apply the resist, the gesture, whether it’s sprayed on, painted or scraped on...the image is different each time but there is always a shadow of the original image. Details are lost to be replaced with the details of the process; the spots and specks of coagulated ink. The image is abraded, it disintegrates, all sorts of interesting incidents occur, though you can still see the shadows of trees, rocks, water, mountains, all the elements of the image.” - Paul Winstanley

Paul Winstanley incorporates these images into a photogravure process and prints them with re-imagined colour and sense of light. The artist presents eight variations as photogravure prints, five large scale photogravure prints incorporating hand painting and two previously unseen paintings, all originating from this process of decay and reinvention. 

By revisiting the making of the artwork and altering its material surface, Paul Winstanley considers his new prints and paintings to be re-enactments that give the work a contemporary urgency and energy. The works, with their hazy and distorted quality, become distanced from their original subject matter, leaving the viewer to imbue the compositions with their own interpretation.

The artist also exhibits The Viewers, 2020-2023, a group of prints based on installation shots of various of his own recent solo shows in which photographs of museum visitors are incorporated into the gallery space creating semi-fictional images.

“I’ve talked about the role of the viewer in my work for years but these actually attempt to picture this, dismember it and reveal some sort of truth through the use of artifice and fiction. And this can also be said of the landscape prints and paintings. They are not quite what they seem.” - Paul Winstanley.

PAUL WINSTANLEY

Paul Winstanley was born in Manchester in 1954. He studied painting at Cardiff College of Art and the Slade School of Art, London. Schooled in the orthodoxies of abstract Modernism, Paul Winstanley spent a decade after college establishing a new visual language, combining the tenets of minimalism with the pictorialism of photography.

Paul Winstanley has been exhibiting internationally since the late 1970s. He won the first prize of the Unilever Award at the Whitechapel Open in 1989, and two years later was artist-in-residence at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. He has had solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Munich, Hamburg, Madrid, Dublin, New York, Los Angeles and in Auckland, New Zealand.

Paul Winstanley’s work is represented in several important public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including Tate; the British Museum; British Council; Government Art Collection, London; MoMA, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Fonds National d’art Contemporain, Paris.

He lives and works in London.

www.paulwinstanley.com

Instagram: @paulwinstanley54

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

Counterpoint Exhibition @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - A survey of abstract art spanning over seventy years and featuring 17 artists

Counterpoint

Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Polly Apfelbaum, Rana Begum, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ian Davenport, Naum Gabo, Patrick Heron, Tess Jaray, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Odili Donald Odita, Julian Opie, Bridget Riley, Sean Scully, Cornelia Thomsen, Richard Woods

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

19 January - 2 March 2024

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents a survey of abstract art spanning over seventy years and featuring more than 15 artists.

Counterpoint, a term that refers to musical harmony, explores how successive generations of international artists, from the 1950s to present day, have articulated abstraction through series, creating interlinked works underpinned by a consistent visual element, such as colour, orientation, density or repetition.

New series of prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Cornelia Thomsen and Odili Donald Odita, exhibited for the first time in the UK, and works by their contemporaries including Rana Begum, Ian Davenport and Julian Opie, will be displayed together with prints by pioneers of the mid-twentieth century, including Naum Gabo, Josef Albers, Bridget Riley and Donald Judd.

Counterpoint, takes its title from the relationship between two or more musical lines in a composition that are played at the same time. Although dependent on each other to create a harmony, they remain independent in rhythm and melodic contour. This ‘counterpoint’ is perfectly expressed in Nineteen Greys, 1968 by Bridget Riley (b. 1931), one of the artist’s most accomplished works of art. The series consists of four prints, each featuring nineteen tones of grey. In each work the directional flow of the tones vary, creating a sense of movement; the complex structure of the four works seen together creates an arresting visual sensation for the viewer.

Such complex and striking abstraction is also seen in prints from the 1960s and 70s by Tess Jaray (b.1937), Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) and Anni Albers (1899 – 1994). Tess Jaray uses perspective and form to create an illusion of space. Three prints by the artist depict geometric shapes, evoking decorative architectural patterns, laid over strong bands of colour. Counterpoint features eight prints, Midnight and Noon, 1964 by Josef Albers from his Homage to the Square series which explores colour theory. To make the works Albers used only one ink, printed in two different densities on two separate plates to produce three colour variations. Anni Albers’s Meander series is inspired by forms and patterns used in ancient Mexican art. The paper of each Meander print went through a screen printing press four times, the colour becoming deeper and richer each time it was printed over.

Patrick Heron (1920 – 1999) also explored the interaction of colour in his work. Printmaking was integral to the development of Heron’s pictorial language, and Counterpoint features three screenprints from a series made in 1973 exploring different uses of colour in one composition, characterised by clean lines and flattened forms.

In contrast to other artists in the exhibition, Naum Gabo (1890 – 1977) eschewed the traditional notion that prints should be made in runs of identical editions. He use of woodcut allowed him to take a single composition and explore it through numerous variations by altering colour, paper, pressure and orientation. Contemporary artist Richard Woods (b.1966) also favours the use of woodcut to experiment with variations of the same image. The exhibition features four brightly coloured compositions which reference the present day prevalence of graphs and charts to explain trends and targets. Entitled Pie Charts, 2021, Woods uses the process of printmaking to push one core element in myriad directions.

Late woodcuts by Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) and aquatints by Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) are also exhibited. Interested in repetition and seriality, both artists often used basic shapes, colours and simple numerical sequences to create complex patterns. Contemporary artist Julian Opie (b. 1958) also explores these qualities of an image in Office Windows, 2017, a series of fifteen screenprints. Using simple geometric patterns of squares and rectangles, Julian Opie who is interested in how a universal image is formed and recognised, depicts groups of windows from an office block. Each work stands in relation to the others, but it’s arrangement is not definitive and elements can be reordered.

Ian Davenport (b. 1966) who prefers to work in series, exhibits his first ever group of prints, Ovals, made in 2002. Exploring tonal colour relationships, six ovals are placed in blocks of colour. In each component module, hung almost like a mosaic, there is a strong contrast of colours from one print to the next, as some colours pop forward with greater force.

Four new prints by Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966), the artist’s first major project at this scale in screenprint will be exhibited for the first time in the UK. Featuring geometric patterns and vibrant hues, Firewall, 2023, are characteristic of a practice which is concerned with the power and dynamics of colour. In Polly Apfelbaum’s (b.1955) new graphic works, the artist uses a repeating, interlocking pattern to explore shifts in colour alongside the tactile surface of moulded paper pulp.

Sean Scully (b. 1945) although interested in the formal rigour of abstract art, often applies colour fluidly, creating soft edges. This is demonstrated in a group of etchings by the artist entitled Seven Mirrors, 1997. Each work features two columns of conjoined stripes, in which one column appears to mirror the other.

Counterpoint also features eight new prints by Cornelia Thomsen (b. 1970), seen for the first time in the UK, that explore the mathematical principles of the golden ratio. Also known as the divine proportion, this number arrangement which refers to how a work is divided and how its various elements interact, has been used by artists for centuries. Cornelia Thomsen focuses on a liner depiction of the golden ratio, to create rectangular blocks of related colours.

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s (1923 – 2019) investigations of colour and light extend beyond the surface of the work and are informed by the viewer’s visual and perceptual experiences of colour. A group of screenprints, made towards the end of his life are completed by the viewer’s movement and engagement of each piece. A series of prints by Rana Begum (b. 1977) that also appear to change in relation to the viewer’s position as they pass in front of them, are on show. In these recent works light is gently absorbed and reflected across printed layers of silver and white, so the viewer experiences a surface akin to reflective materials.

The works on show in this expansive exhibition constitute masterclasses in technical printing. All of the artists, be they past or present, demonstrate how seemingly simple formulas can be used to generate complex groups of artworks and that articulating abstraction through series has evolved into a universal language that can engage any viewer. 

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

Rana Begum @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Reflection on Colour and Form

Rana Begum 

Reflection on Colour and Form

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

10 June - 30 July 2022

Rana Begum (b. 1977), who blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting, and architecture, added printmaking to her creative practice when she made her first editions in 2018. As part of her ongoing investigation into the interaction between form, light and colour, this exhibition will showcase Rana Begum’s developments over the past five years and unveil a series of new lenticular editions, small sculptures, and large-scale installations.

Rana Begum’s first foray into printmaking came in the form of two groups of small etchings, (No. 860 and No. 861, 2018), and a series of four larger mesh prints made in 2019. Featuring overlapping fluorescent colours and geometric patterns, these works explore both the ambiance and unpredictability created by neighbouring colours.

Rana Begum’s investigations into colour relationships and visual perceptions are inspired by the urban landscape as well as patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Rana Begum comments, “I love the focus required for printmaking – the need to consider colour and form and how they interact with each other. There is a feeling of deliberation, a slowing down of the production process that makes it more considered, more intentional. However, alongside this there is also an unpredictability, a loss of control, that I find exciting and creatively inspiring.

While printmaking is a relatively new venture for me, I think the principle of methodical process and repetition has always been at the heart of my practice. Having grown up reciting prayers from the Quran, I have always found this feeling of rhythm and repetition meditative.”

Light is essential to her process; for a new series of prints, 88 A – L, (2021) Rana Begum uses light to draw out contrasts. Twelve screenprints have been printed in layers of silver and white, each accented with a primary colour. Light is gently absorbed and reflected across the work, so the viewer experiences a surface akin to reflective materials.

Eight new lenticular editions will be unveiled for the first time, each featuring vibrant geometric colour combinations that change in relation to the viewers’ position as they pass in front of them. Begum’s first experiments in lenticular technology allow her to present colour in continuous flux.

Rana Begum will draw aspects of her editions into the three-dimensional space, in the form of small sculptures and two larger installations. The grids featured in her mesh prints are folded out into the gallery space to create a floor-based installation. For a second installation, the geometry and colour of her screenprints, reminiscent of hazard tape, are reimagined in steel.

These sculptures and installations demonstrate the ongoing dialogue between Rana Begum’s printmaking practice and her explorations in the studio, as printmaking continues to open new possibilities and directions for the artist to explore.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

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Barbara Walker @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Vanishing Point

Barbara Walker: Vanishing Point 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

18 March - 23 April 2022 

A major exhibition of new work by Barbara Walker MBE (b. 1964), which confronts and readdresses the under-representation of Black figures in Western art history, opens at Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Vanishing Point features new works which combine detailed graphite drawing and blind embossing to reinterpret classical paintings. Barbara Walker places a Black figure at the centre of each work, offering an alternative and balanced depiction of the European artistic cannon. These works, the culmination of a five-year project, will be exhibited for the first time alongside a new large-scale wall drawing.

Barbara Walker, who often spends several years on projects, undertaking research that includes working with public archives, began her Vanishing Point series in 2017 following the receipt of the Evelyn Williams drawing award at the Jerwood Drawing Prize, which enabled her to research, develop and exhibit the beginnings of the series at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings (now known as Hastings Contemporary). All the works are variations on Old Master or classical Western paintings that are housed in major public museums, including the National Gallery, London and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Walker selects paintings by artists from the Renaissance period through to the Dutch Golden Age, such as Paolo Veronese, Daniël Mijtens, Johann Liss, Hendrik Heerschop, Daniel Vertangen, and Pierre Mignard.

She focuses on scenes with Black subjects, who are often depicted in the role of slaves, servants or attendants. The white figures in the picture are embossed out, leaving a blank sheet of white paper onto which Walker draws the Black figures in graphite. In some drawings other parts of the image, such as the landscape or skies, are also reconstructed through drawing and the occasional touches of colour. The final pieces subtly draw attention to the Black figure, demonstrating artistic and historical erasure and inviting contemplation on how history is made and unmade.

Barbara Walker has used imagery sourced from prints in the collections of the British Museum and Rijksmuseum to make four small drawings, entitled Marking the Moment. For each work she draws the complete scene, then covers the majority of it with mylar, obscuring the picture and leaving only the Black figure revealed. A large-scale wall drawing featuring sections taken from classical paintings will complement the framed drawings on display. Walker is well-known for these large-scale installations, as seen recently at Turner Contemporary, England (2019-21), Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020) and the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy (2017).

Barbara Walker’s experience of growing up in a Jamaican family in Birmingham, UK, has directly shaped her practice. Informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of the diverse immigrant communities around her, she works in a range of media and formats to make figurative works, highlighting people who are often cast as minorities. Recognising both past and current issues and prejudices faced by Black communities, Vanishing Point links historical and contemporary questions concerning race, class and power.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

www.cristearoberts.com

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The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Discovery and Invention - Exhibition + Catalogue

Discovery and Invention

The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

10 December, 2021 - 22 January 2022

(closed 20 December - 3 January)

The first major survey of early graphic works by JOSEF ALBERS (1888 - 1976), tracing the artist’s early printmaking career, beginning with his first explorations of the medium in 1916, whilst teaching in an elementary school, and ending in his final year at Black Mountain College, USA, in 1950.

Almost 50 works on paper will be on show, all of which come directly from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and they feature scenes of domestic animals, local industry, rare self-portraits as well as portraits of his friends. The exhibition will culminate in the first appearance of geometric forms inspired by pre-Columbian architecture. This comprehensive review explores the complex themes and subject matter that shaped the evolution of Albers’s work in the first half of the twentieth century, prior to his experimentation with his renowned homages to the square.

Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Josef Albers was a naturally gifted printmaker, who possessed an innate ability to push techniques and materials to new limits. The progression from his first print to his final portfolios was the culmination of a lifetime of complex artistic investigation, an evolution most clearly revealed through the historical arc of his printmaking practice.”

Josef Albers first seriously took up printmaking in 1916, at the age of 28. After attending the Royal Art School, Berlin, from 1913 – 1915, he returned home to Bottrop to take up a teaching position. Simultaneously he resumed his studies at the School of Applied Arts in nearby Essen, where he began printmaking via bookplates and greetings cards. He focused on everyday subject matter to produce accomplished linocuts and lithographs depicting local landmarks, such as sand and coal-mines and animals. Using what was available to him during wartime, these graphic works were printed on a variety of papers and on sheets of different sizes. Albers first lithographs were based on dancers he had observed in a ballet entitled The Green Flute in 1916. His portraits from this period include studies of his own striking profile and those of his friends. The soft floating figures from The Green Flute series and his portraits reveal the playful and informal side of Albers’ character, as well as his developing fascination with the interplay of two and three-dimensional space.

Josef Albers second period of focused printmaking begins after the Bauhaus closed in 1933, when he arrived at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina, USA. Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation discusses his prints from this era; “They mark a point of transition from the hard-edged forms and linear geometries associated with his major Bauhaus works in sandblasted glass, which investigated the interplay and exchangeability of figure and ground, to an engagement with evocative line and organic patterns.” Now also working in woodcut, Josef Albers delighted in the irregularities of wood grain and cork and the possibilities they lent to printmaking.

Prints made whilst teaching at Black Mountain Collage were also inspired by Albers frequent visits to Mexico which began in 1935/36. He travelled to archaeological sites throughout the country studying the constructions, the influence of which emerges in his work during the preceding years. As Albers style and themes developed, his prints made in the mid to late 1940s demonstrate his pursuit of linear geometry in a more refined format than ever before. He began using a limited amount of simple ruled lines to create forms that appear to rotate and shift. These later prints share fundamental traits with, and pave the wave for, his Homage to the Square works, which Albers explored in the final decades of his life.

Josef Albers

Discovery and Invention

The Early Graphic Works 

© 2021 Cristea Roberts Gallery - ART/BOOKS

On the jacket: Josef Albers, Self-portrait, 1916, 

Linoleum cut, paper 46 × 29.5 cm, image 21.6 × 16.5 cm (detail). 

Copyright © 2021 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Discovery and Invention: The Early Graphic Works of Josef Albers is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardback catalogue (160 pages with 158 illustrations) with an introduction by David Cleaton-Roberts and essays by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, and Jeannette Redensek, Research Curator and Josef Albers Catalogue Raisonné Director, both of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. If you are interested, please visit Criste Roberts Gallery's website.

A major exhibition featuring over 350 objects, entitled Anni et Josef Albers - L'art et la vie (Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life), is currently on show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris until 9 January 2022.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

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Christiane Baumgartner @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Wish you were here

Christiane Baumgartner 

Wish you were here 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Through 4 December 2021 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, presents a major new body of work by German artist CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER (b. 1967), concerned with the movement and the play of light across the horizons of land and sea.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, unveiled for the first time in the UK, is the largest and most ambitious work ever made by Christiane Baumgartner; sequential views of a cascading waterfall, measuring over nine metres in width. Christiane Baumgartner, who combines contemporary technology in the form of digital video and photography alongside time-honoured printing techniques to create monumental woodcuts, is also display her first depictions of a sunrise, and a new series of ‘reverse drawings’ featuring abstract configurations of colour.

The exhibition title originates from a new monumental print by the artist entitled Wish you were here, 2020, that in turn derives from Christiane Baumgartner’s affection for the Baltic coast of Germany, a place where she camped every summer when she was growing up. Wish you were here and related print Weststrand, 2021, which both depict the local skyline, stem from a result of Christiane Baumgartner’s still frequent visits to the coastline, areas of which have more hours of sunlight than any other location in Germany.

At the centre of the exhibition is Stairway to Heaven, 2019, which consists of five monochrome woodcuts derived from photographs Baumgartner took of a large waterfall outside Quebec City, Canada. The depictions of tumbling, cascading, and spraying water, are tightly hung with the horizon lines created by the water’s surface aligned, creating a focal point for the viewer’s eye that also conveys the potentially destructive of this ever-changing natural phenomenon. The woodblocks for this work took several months to complete before Christiane Baumgartner printed the edition, alongside others, by hand, in her studio in the famous Leipzig Cotton Mill in East Germany.

Smaller works in the show include Christiane Baumgartner’s first depictions of a sunrise in Totes Meer, 2021, and Early Morning, 2021, Promise, 2021, which captures sunlight breaking through clouds, The Visit, 2021, which illustrates a bright flash of sunlight reflected on water below, and Prometheus I - III, 2021, a series of three woodcuts that capture different views of the setting sun. Many of Christiane Baumgartner’s prints take the form of sequences of images illustrating the same scene, captured moments apart. Pink Moon, 2019, a series of six woodcuts depicting the moon on the horizon, is taken from stills of a film Christiane Baumgartner recorded whilst driving across a German island in the Baltic Sea, on a late spring evening.

A unique woodcut measuring over two metres in height, from Christiane Baumgartner’s new Contre-jour series, is also displayed in the gallery. The title of the work, which means “against daylight”, refers to a photographic technique in which the camera is pointing directly towards the source of light. This large-scale woodcut records daylight shining through a wooded landscape against a blue backdrop. Christiane Baumgartner’s recent use of colour in her woodcuts, also appears in her etchings and drawings. Over the past two years Christiane Baumgartner has been creating what she describes as ‘reverse drawings.’ To make these the artist inks small wooden blocks with a single colour, presses a piece of Japanese paper onto each surface, and draws on the versos. To make the series Französische Suiten I–VII, 2019, Christiane Baumgartner repeated this process up to twenty times, so that the resulting drawings range in colour from dark and earthy tones to vibrant colours. Französische Suiten I–VII is exhibited alongside a second suite, Ruby Tuesday, from Christiane Baumgartner's 2020 Diaries series.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

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Clare Woods @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - The Great Unknown

Clare Woods: The Great Unknown 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

21 May - 19 June 2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of new collages and prints by British artist CLARE WOODS (b. 1972) . The Great Unknown explores the themes of fragility, transience and otherness, the delicate borders that exist between sickness and health, cruelty and humanity, and the cycle of life. Having initially trained as a sculptor, Woods’ understanding of sculptural forms underpin her pictorial work. New collages and prints depicting interiors, still life and portraiture encourage an understanding of what it means to live in a time of mass image consumption and in a world that treats banality and disaster in the same way.

Drawing inspiration from photographs found from diverse sources such as books, magazines, the internet and her own lexicon of images, Clare Woods is preoccupied with the human body and its environment. She reinterprets the found imagery, cropping or repositioning the subjects so that they hover on the edge of legibility and figuration. Though her work cannot exist without photography, it is not the origin of the image that is important to Clare Woods. She is concerned with the emotional response the imagery triggers within her and its potential for reinterpretation or translation by the viewer.

By creating new content and context through the physical act of making, Clare Woods challenges the viewer’s experiences of fear, anxiety and the destructive impulses of humankind. This is seen in the fragility of rotting fruit in Dead Already, 2019, or the vulnerability of the human figure in Collage for Jargon, 2020, which depicts a close up cropped detail of an open mouth, in Collage for the Cook, 2020, an image of a bandaged hand, and in Rest Cure, 2019, which shows a resting head, seemingly detached from its body.

Flowers are a recent addition to Clare Woods’ repertoire of subjects and are seen in several works including Collage for It’s the End of the World as We Know It, 2020, and a series of four large-scale screenprints with woodblock collectively entitled The Difference Between Now and Then, 2020. Clare Woods comments; “For me, the idea of a vase of flowers represents a life span, in a tiny little environment. You’ve got the youth of the buds and the flowers are in full bloom, before they droop and discolour, and then the petals fall off and they die. It’s the whole life cycle that I am interested in.”

The disjunction between figuration and abstraction lies at the heart of ClareWoods’ works and during the translation into collage or print a space is created. There is no direct ‘touch’ between the artist and the collage and print in the same way as there is in her painting. When Woods has finished with a colour, she applies the leftover paint to sheets of paper. She then uses these coloured sheets to make collages. Although these collaged papers are a by-product of the painting process they themselves go through a tracing, drawing, cutting and sticking production line where a gap is formed by process. Happy accidents and a loss of control arising from the various mechanical printing processes contribute to the physical breakdown of the image and allow for a deceleration and fragmentation of the subject.

The Great Unknown is the first showing of a major body of prints and collages by the artist. Clare Woods comments: 

“This exploration of the screenprinting, monoprinting and collage processes has afforded me the opportunity to deconstruct, reimagine and reassemble imagery in a completely new way. While adhering to the composition and colour palette of recent paintings I have relished being able to occupy a compelling space between paint and print. There is a magic that happens in that space that you do not get in painting. And that, for me, is what felt fundamentally different about print. I wanted to capture that with the title. Because it is ‘the great unknown’ – the idea of lifting the paper and not knowing what you are going to get. I had no idea when I named the show, back in February 2020, how significant the title could be seen in terms of the world we are now experiencing.”

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY 

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG 

cristearoberts.com

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Marie Harnett @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - What Was My Own

Marie Harnett: What Was My Own 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

Through 15 May 2021 

A major exhibition of new works by British artist MARIE HARNETT (b. 1983), capturing fleeting moments of drama, beauty and sus­pense from contemporary film, is on view at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London. What Was My Own features over thirty new highly detailed, meticulous drawings, both large and minute in scale, derived from film stills. A sense of unease and melancholy pervades Marie Harnett’s new work, as we are offered glimpses into scenes that present an emotion or history that is suddenly intimate and familiar to us.

The new drawings, completed last year whilst Marie Harnett was living in both London and Norway, derive from period dramas. Scenes of domesticity, blossoming trees, baskets and platters, abundant with food, figures dancing, laughing and couples embracing are exhibited alongside images of vacant winterscapes, bare trees, extinguished candles, empty rooms, lonely figures and expressions of grief or sadness. Marie Harnett's skillful draughtsmanship and attention to detail sees her focus on every aspect of pose, light and texture of these described moments. Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound, frame by frame, until she finds inspiration. She removes the colour and takes the still out of its narrative context, suspending a moment in time.  

In several drawings we appear to be witnessing a pause before or after an event. In What was My Own, 2020, and It’s Exactly as I Planned, 2020, we do not know if figures are turning away from or towards us. Do Not Speak It, 2020, depicts a woman who on first glance appears to be sleeping but the expression on her face indicates grief or pain. The perspective we are offered in each of the drawings suggests we are intruding on the scenes. In Change the World, 2020, a chaotic spectacle depicting a party, goes one step further. This large-scale drawing measuring almost 150 cm wide, which is full of life and energy, does not feature the faces of its figures. They have been obscured or removed completely, suggesting an undertone of darkness and unease.

Marie Harnett continues this theme in new overlap drawings. This involves her taking two stills and superimposing one on top of the other. She uses her source imagery to create a unique image that takes on its own life and a new story. In She Broke the Rules, 2019, a large-scale drawing measuring over 150 cm wide, Marie Harnett presents a couple picnicking in a forest, but not all is as it seems. Marie Harnett comments; “Stills are layered atop each other, building in a false representation. The forest is actually a stage set. The figures are having a picnic, but the overlaying image is snowing. The drawing represents a sense of passing time, misremembering and lost love and pain.” Harnett adds surreal twists to her drawings, which have been inspired by the uncanny.

Marie Harnett’s wider inspirations are drawn from varied sources. She cites Dutch seventeenth-century painting; Vermeer; Rubens; the German Romantics; Baroque painting; swooning figures from eighteenth-century classical art; Degas dancers; and the dreamlike elements from works by Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar, amongst others, as influences on this new body of work.

What Was My Own is Marie Harnett’s third solo exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery. In Summer 2019 Marie Harnett completed a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut. Her work will feature in a forthcoming exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Other recent exhibitions include Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, and Haugesund Billedgalleri, Haugesund, Norway.

Her works are housed in the permanent collections of British Museum, London; Government Art Collection, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh; Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany; Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

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Georg Baselitz @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Hands

Georg Baselitz: Hands

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

13 April - 15 May 2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents an exhibition of a major new body of work by German artist Georg Baselitz (b. 1938). 

Hands focuses on two new series of prints that explore the subject of the hand. Estranged from the body, the hands writhe and twist, emerging in a series of renderings that form part of Georg Baselitz’s ongoing survey of the human form, which has been at the forefront of his practice since the 1960s.

The first series, entitled Eine Hand ist keine Faust, 2019 – translated as A Hand is not a Fist – consists of 12 etchings, each depicting Baselitz’s hand clenching, pointing, grabbing and twisting. Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts comments; “Each one is a delicate depiction of the artist’s own hand, drawn onto the copper plate in a variety of positions and each printed in one of three colours. The second project is comprised of two complementary suites of ten aquatints titled Mano – one group printed in gold and the other in white, depicting an abstracted representation of a hand, printed onto dense, dark backgrounds. The two suites show distinct and contrasting renderings of a hand, both haunting and powerful.”

The second suite of prints Mano (gold) and Mano (white), 2019, consisting of ten aquatints each, hover closer to abstraction as the hands, now more fragile and open, emerge from a dark background, appearing to loosen their grip. Hands showcases a pictorial device for which Georg Baselitz has long been recognised, with all his images appearing upside down. For the past fifty years he has subverted traditional representations of the human form by upending his figure and its component parts. This inversion acts partially as a vehicle for Georg Baselitz to remove focus from the narrative content so that he can explore the mark making itself.

Georg Baselitz is a prolific printmaker and printmaking is as essential a part of his artistic practice as painting, drawing and sculpture. He uses a variety of intaglio techniques to realise these new works; having initially drawn and proofed the plates on his own etching press at his studio on the Ammersee, outside Munich, he then works with a master printer who pulls the final editions. Hands forms part of a wider project which includes paintings, sculptures and drawings, all on the same subject, which Baselitz began in 2019.

This is be the artist’s second solo exhibition (after Georg Baselitz: Devotion in 2019) at the Cristea Roberts Gallery, which represents the artist for his original prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a text by David Cleaton-Roberts and an essay by psychoanalyst and author, Darian Leader.

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY

43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG

cristearoberts.com

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Vicken Parsons @ Cristea Roberts Gallery, London - Breath

Vicken Parsons: Breath 

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London 

13 February - 14 March 2020 

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents a new body of paintings and painted objects by VICKEN PARSONS (b. 1957). Breath, her largest solo exhibition in the UK in over three years, unveils twenty-five new works.

Best-known for her small-scale paintings which evoke architectural spaces Vicken Parsons uses thin layers of oil paint on thick plywood panel. The title of the exhibition, Breath, refers to the artist’s use of painting as meditation and as a contemplative counterpoint to global concerns. Paintings are shown alongside new three-dimensional works, which Vicken Parsons describes as ‘painted objects’. In the catalogue conversation, artist David Batchelor describes these works; “To some extent they look like extruded paintings, pulled into 3D.” Parsons does not view the three-dimensional works as sculptural in their concerns; they are about painting and colour. Painted steel wire and blocks cast shadows and reflections on to their horizontal base, which is the same plywood she uses for her paintings. In both bodies of work the trace and warmth of the wood is often exposed through the transparency of the paint.

A new group of paintings by Vicken Parsons feature prominent yellow elements. Within a careful confusion of yellow planes, lines and marks, the eye of the viewer is engaged in continuous movement between an illusory deep space and the picture plane. Parsons says; “Yellow is also very important to me. The yellow I am using is a lemony-lime colour: it’s a slippery beast and comes out of and goes back into grey. Yellow is usually thought of as a warm colour but this one has a coolness about it.”

Slightly darker, shadowy environments are painted with a palette of subtle greys and several more paintings give eminence to one colour such as a vivid orange, red or blue. Through the careful blending and applying of pigment, one meticulous layer after another, the colours bleed into each other. It is not clear where the source of light is and what is reflection, illusion and reality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a conversation between Vicken Parsons and artist David Batchelor. 

CRISTEA ROBERTS GALLERY, LONDON 

www.cristearoberts.com