HEDDA STERNE
2020-03-16The works in this exhibition are drawn principally from the early 1960s when, inspired by a year and a half spent living in Venice as a Fulbright fellow, Sterne embarked upon a series of ostensibly quieter works composed of numerous horizontals that read as multiple horizon lines. These meditative Vertical Horizontals are at once self-contained, having a kinship with minimalist abstraction, and poetic intimations of landscape, with water and sky seemingly repeated and reflected multiple times within a single image. Sterne described her work as a process of ongoing exploration and discovery. The romantic tendency on display here, with opalescent whites, creams and greys and sonorous umbers interspersed with flashes of ochre, green and gold, is characteristic of a restless, searching quality, elaborated upon in a quote by the artist in which she states, ‘I believe… that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing. What entrances me in art is what cannot be entrapped in words.’
Opposite – Vertical Horizontal XVII, 1963
Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020
Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
W1S 1FE London
