Through The Walls: Group Exhibition

Kim Bartelt trained in painting at the Parson’s School of Design but abandoned the medium in favour of using found paper in her compositions. Bartelt painstakingly pastes irregular segments of coloured and transparent sheets of paper to canvas. Her paintings are infused with a delicate energy, embodying the meditative quality of her minute collage process. The sensitivity of the semi-transparent tissue paper used emphasises this process of layering and accumulation. Collected over the years, these re-used fragments allude to their past applications in their wrinkles and folds. In her more recent works, the paper is imbued with a greater sense of conceptuality, reflecting on the nature and physical properties of painting but also as an index linking each painting to its core meanings.

Primarily known for his textile works, Lawrence’s work incorporates a variety of fabrics, from cotton silk and linen to suede and wool. Working within the idiom of modernist painting, he takes the material support – the canvas or the plane – and sews, bleaches, stretches or stains the fabric to create works that aims to unify abstraction and representation. Lawrence is at his best working within a limited range of colour; preferring instead to exploit surface, texture and tonality. The grain of the textiles, and the variations in textures have their own beauty through which he conveys an atmosphere and delineation of form. Lawrence sees opportunities in the material before he creates the work. Each piece has an independent identity and in a parental role, Lawrence simply assists in that realisation. Lawrence regards his work as an organic process of experimentation and discovery, led by his materials on a journey of improvisation. He still regards his role in the work as a director, letting serendipity guide the final piece or perhaps, visual performance of his evanescent cast. By working with materials that already have a history – lost in the weave and textures of his creations – Lawrence invites the viewer on a forensic journey. He asks that the audience entertains an idea of a life before the work, a story from manufacture to reclamation that leads to each individual outcome.

Andreas Diaz Andersson is a Swedish-Mexican artist known for his distinctly meticulous minimalist abstractions. Andersson’s work is defined by a harmonious use of shapes and lines achieved through the use of textiles and different paint mediums such as acrylic, plasticolour and aerosol paint on cotton canvas. When viewed from afar, Andersson’s carefully considered compositions may look simple, but the complexity of his works becomes clearer upon close inspection. Made with exceptional precision and a meticulous attention to detail, the works are an exploration of depth and form, hovering between illusion and abstraction. By playing with different colours and textures arranged systematically his works attain a spatially reflective quality. The physical, spatial and conceptual depth of the canvas fluctuates based on where the viewer stands, creating a constant variation of dynamic geometric patterns and deep vanishing points.

Mimi Jung redefines the traditional practice of weaving, experimenting with intricate new techniques while exploring her own resonant personal experiences. Jung breaks from the conventions of weaving to create her own visual language. Through the spectrum of works originating from the loom, Jung investigates the way people continuously negotiate space within and between themselves. Her work examines multiple dimensions of identity and self-preservation, particularly relating to private and public self-representation and the ways these depictions are manifested through social and cultural mores. Her works play with the expansion or narrowing of space, placing great emphasis on the space existing between the warp and the weft. Her limning of space is reflexive, visible to those who are predisposed to see it.

Perla Krauze works with a number of materials from lead, clay and water to stone. Using graphite frottages from stones and pavements and engraved volcanic rocks from El Pedregal, her paintings are abstract topographies and mappings. Stone is a fundamental material in her practice; linked to memory and durability, it can also be transformed and eroded. The crosshatch patterns in her paintings derive from the lines made in stone cutting, emphasising the transformation of stone from raw material to art object. Described as ‘grayscale tone poems’, Krauze alters and arranges stones to make miniature landscapes, complete in themselves but still referencing their origins.  Much of her work welcomes the discussion of geography and petrology, documenting the El Pedregal area of Mexico City in particular. This region of the city has a distinct cultural and physical topology. Mythical and raw, it houses the ruins of Cuilcuilco, the oldest city in Mexico, and Copilco, both covered by lava from the eruption of the Xitle volcano three thousand years ago. Krauze also references architecture from the past century in her paintings and sculpture including the Museo Anahuacalli and Casa Prieto designed by Luis Barragan.