Page 31 - Art Review

5 Giorgio Griffa, Canone aureo 458, 2012,
acrylic on canvas, 160 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist
and Casey Kaplan, New York

7 Tara Donovan, Composition (Cards), 2017, styrene cards and glue,
57 × 57 × 10 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pace London

Scanning gaze. While increasingly folding in engaged with different supports and the crea- 7 It’s hard to say if Tara Donovan’s work
gnomic, codelike numbers, the Turinese artist, tive potential of their material irregularities. is abstract or not; or if that matters, really.
now eighty-one, has maintained his approach, Lately there’s been a minirevival for her 1970s On a macro scale the Flushing-born artist’s
and extraordinarily, as A Continuous Becoming vertical-stripe works, made by painting over works tend to be biomorphic and engulfing,
affirms, it’s lost none of its punch or vibe of tape that was later removed and meticulously on the micro they’re laboriously constructed
exploration. A work like 2012’s Canone Aureo 458, transferred to Plexiglas; during the 80s, she – ‘which sometimes involves an extremely
where a central row of digits divides an upper- made voluminous paintings on stone, slate tedious process’, as her Wiki unsentimentally
most field of ultramarine and aquamarine and steel that grew geometries around pre- has it – from worldly items such as toothpicks,
floating commas from a lower scatter of lavender- existing blemishes and colours, and spoke to Styrofoam cups, paper plates, tarpaper, nylon
and-orange pickup sticks, is as fresh and open constant natural elements: sky, desert, ocean. fibre, etc. Concerned, as she said recently, with
as Griffa’s earliest experiments in this manner: Recently she’s favoured salvaged steel and linen, ‘how the aesthetic potential of an aggregated
lean, sunny, mysterious, familiar, new. culled inspiration from the negative spaces material can be activated in ways that play with
Abstraction seems to be in fashion one in scraps of cut metal and bent her composing perceptual capacities’, she’s also consistently
year and out the next – last year out, probably towards, again, the natural: flowers, landscapes, maintained a drawing practice, though her
back by now – but likely this doesn’t register deep night skies, trees. The result, melding new Compositions (2017) series are only superfi-
6 for Griffa, nor for Merrill Wagner. Also in her modernist abstraction and a plainspoken cially part of it. Certainly they’re approximately
early eighties, she began fashioning geometric love of nature, is an industrial romanticism 2D, being made of layered styrene cards, wall-
abstractions during the late 1960s and has long detached from linear time in the best way. mounted and framed. The results are shim-

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