Sophie Bouvier Ausländer, Jyll Bradley and Rebecca Salter

Overview

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition with new works by Jyll Bradley, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer and Rebecca Salter PA.

The exhibition brings together three women artists at the height of their game. While embedded in their individual oeuvres, all three artists present new bodies of works that form a fresh development in their practice mostly emerging from their research during the pandemic period.

Jyll Bradley’s new series Fingers continues the British artist’s fascination with the process, structure and metaphor associated with growing hops, and relate to her acclaimed sculpture The Hop (2022) currently on show at the Hayward Gallery. Fingers draw their title and form from elements of the Kentish oasthouses which were part of Bradley’s childhood landscape. Bradley has researched rural finger motifs and rendered them - or fractals of them - as computer generated graphic designs. Made with coloured carbon paper - a material she connects with her late father - the development of Fingers took place in the solitude of the artist’s studio through the uncertainties of Brexit and lockdown. These intimate drawings conveying feelings of both hesitancy and direction offer special insight into Bradley’s artistic process.

Abandoning the map and its territory from her earlier series Sophie Bouvier Ausländer turned towards media information and started to use the idiosyncratic pink paper of the Financial Times for a new series created since the beginning of Covid-19. The Swiss artist obliterates news citing the current state of our planet by drowning it in colour, to then dig into the paper and exhume parts of its original make up. The surface area is torn, re-collaged and harmed in the process, the formal composition of a printed newspaper page transforms into an ephemeral relief. Additional to the excavation process Bouvier Ausländer employs an expressive use of colour and gestures to rearrange and recharge the original content, suggesting a new world and vision.

Rebecca Salter’s works spring from process-based experimentation. The British artist’s new works on paper are minutely detailed minimal abstractions where a particular emphasis is given to the interplay between marked and unmarked space on the surface of the paper. The layering of neutral tones often suffuses the work with an ethereal quality, offering a tranquil, yet spellbinding, response to nature. Salter uses Japanese paper to execute her complex compositions, sometimes covering her drawings with a wafer thin, slightly translucent layer to mute the blackness of the ink and achieve softer tonalities and structures. Salter has studied Japanese printing and drawing techniques at depth, its aesthetics and procedures form a crucial influence to her practice until now.

Rebecca Salter was elected the first female president of the Royal Academy in 2017.