Victoria Miro is delighted to present Metamorphoses, the gallery's first exhibition of works by Hedda Sterne (1910–2011) since announcing representation of the artist.
An active member of the New York School, Hedda Sterne, who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1910 and fled to the US in 1941, created an extensive body of work that intersected with some of the most important movements and figures of the twentieth century. A bridge between European Modernism, in particular Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, Sterne's work stands as a testament to her independence of thought, moving freely between figuration and abstraction throughout her long career. Sterne stated, 'I believe... that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing. What entrances me in art is what cannot be entrapped in words.'
The works in this exhibition are drawn from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1960s were an especially productive decade for Sterne, her work becoming increasingly abstract, minimal and experimental as the decade progressed, while also drawing clear inspiration from natural phenomena and elements of landscape. During this period Sterne began meditating daily, a practice that would have a profound effect on her life and work. In 1961, she spent time at Yaddo as an artist in residence, and in 1963, she travelled to Venice, where she would live and work as a Fulbright fellow until the summer of 1964. Shortly after her return to the US, she purchased a property in the East Hampton Springs community, which became her summer home and studio for several decades, and where she was able to work on ever larger canvases, and experiment in profoundly new ways.
Works on view include important paintings from 1967 created by pouring thinned acrylic paint on to raw canvas, Sterne accepting the element of chance and then returning to the canvases to reinterpret and draw out the forms through the addition of lines or swathes of overpainting. She likened the forms that emerged to the dense folds of lettuce leaves, which for Sterne became metaphors for growth and metamorphosis.
Contemporary with the Lettuce works, and a corollary to them, are drawings from a series Sterne would title Baldanders, an invented compound terms of the German words for 'soon' and 'change'. In these, tightly formed objects are centred and contained in large, blank white spaces. Sterne began the drawings with loose movements, allowing lines to flow automatically from her hand to page. At certain moments, as the work grew and changed, she would take back control, directing focus to one space or another to push forward emerging forms, figures, and expressions. Ultimately, Sterne wasn't seeking to relay one vision, she was embracing and moving with rapid change as the work developed.
By the early 1970s, Sterne's preoccupation with change and movement brought her back to the form of the tondo, which she had previously explored at the beginning of the 1950s, and through which she emphasised the way a work can change its effect by a simple rotation. The tondo paintings, two of which are on view, were made with thinned acrylic on raw canvas, some entirely absent of further artistic intervention, others with barely present curves of brushed-on paint. With the circular form, she further did away with control–in her process of making and our viewing of the work, the shape does not impose orientation. Ideally, she suggested, the tondos would be seen turning slowly. Sterne's desire to capture the essence of change and flux, present in these works in various ways, reflects the roots of her practice in the European avant-garde, and presages much of what lay ahead in her life and art practice. Sterne's final artist's statement, composed in 2004, articulates what she felt to be a primary achievement of her life in art: 'With time, I have learned to lose my identity while drawing and to act simply like a conduit, permitting visions that want to take shape to do so.'
Press release courtesy Victoria Miro.
Il Capricorno
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