Inherited Threads

Joan Snyder, Dark Strokes Hope  1971

Niki de Saint Phalle, Shooting Picture  1961

The emphasis on the violent gesture in post-war abstract painting culminated in Saint Phalle’s Shooting Pictures. She filled polythene bags with paint and enclosed them within layers of plaster against a blockboard backing. Spectators were invited to shoot at these constructions, releasing the paint. This one was shot by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Saint Phalle stopped making these works in 1963, explaining ‘I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug’.

Gallery label, January 2016

Lee Ufan, From Line  1978

This work belongs to a series that Lee made by painting long downward lines until the paint on the brush is used up. He then returned to the top and started again. Describing his method, Lee wrote: ‘Load the brush and draw a line. At the beginning it will appear dark and thick, then it will get gradually thinner and finally disappear ... A line must have a beginning and an end. Space appears within the passage of time, and when the process of creating space comes to an end, time also vanishes’.

Gallery label, July 2012

Giorgio Griffa, Three lines with arabesque No.111  1991

Three Lines with Arabesque No.111 1991 is a large-scale portrait-format painting in acrylic paint on a piece of unstretched and unbleached canvas. The composition is based on a sequence of painterly gestures executed with broad brushstrokes in different colours; these gestures start on the left side of the painting and organise the composition into horizontal segments. From the top down, there are three yellow lines; whilst the upper two are continued across the whole width of the canvas, the third one is interrupted after just a short streak. Below this streak the number ‘111’ is painted in the same yellow. Underneath this, starting again on the left, Griffa painted a row of three and a half, free-flowing joined loops in red. Some of the spaces between and within the loops are painted with broad pink brushstrokes. Below this, between the loops and the bottom of the canvas, there are nine wavy blue bands, painted parallel and very close to each other so that they almost touch and create a continuous block of colour. These bands are of slightly different lengths, with the very last one being just half the width of the canvas. The canvas itself has folds that indicate it was folded four times horizontally and four times vertically, creating an underlying grid.

Jacqueline Humphries, ~?j.h%  2018

~?j.h% 2018 is a painting in oil on linen measuring 2540 by 2819 millimetres. From a distance, the composition reads as a series of expansive diagonal red and black scrawls over a ground made up of dense red and black horizontal lines, with a white frame repeating the almost-square shape of the canvas within its perimeter. This composition is animated by patches of yellow paint lying underneath the horizontal lines and impasto gobbets of white paint lying over them, among the diagonals. When viewed from nearby, it becomes possible to see that the horizontal lines are made from the repeated characters ~, ?, j, J, H, h and %, and that these characters were applied through stencils in two layers – a black layer and then a red layer.