B / W

Vija Celmins, Adam Fuss, Philip Guston, Hans Hartung, Susan Hiller, Josephine Meckseper, Mai-Thu Perret, Sean Scully, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol

B/W brings together a group of works that share the simple formal relationship of being without colour. Spanning a broad range of artists, both in generation and artistic concern, the exhibition is arranged in the gallery with a loose connecting narrative.

Beginning with the pop aesthetic of an early abstract stencil by Andy Warhol, and small photograph on canvas by Josephine Meckseper, pop meets minimalism in Mai-Thu Perret’s concrete gym balls. The exhibition then shifts as one encounters the reductive yet profoundly considered lines of Sean Scully, Philip Guston and Hans Hartung.

Line becomes a psycho-geographic experiment in Susan Hiller’s automatic writing light boxes, which lead on to universally charged images of snakes and spiders’ webs in the works of Adam Fuss and Vija Celmins respectively.

Perret’s neon mandala, a work that emerges from the artist’s interest in ancient civilisations and their ‘new age’ interpretations, sits opposite Kiki Smith’s arrestingly elegant female figure borrowed from collective mythology. Finally Celmins’ starry skies conclude the exhibition in the space of the primal and the infinite.