ART CITIES:N.York-Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek first became known in the mid ‘00s for photographs featuring her own makeshift sculptural configurations in which appropriated photos were combined into collages that resounded with personal and political meaning. Constructed in the studio out of found images and pieces of wood, metal, and string, these works, were created solely for the camera and were disassembled after being photographed.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Metro Pictures Gallery Archive

In the past, VanDerBeek’s sculptures have been built in order to be photographed, and for the first time, she presented sculptures in the gallery alongside her photographs in her Hammer Museum Residency in 2012. In “Pieced Quilts, Wrapped Forms”, her solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, Sara VanDerBeek presents large complexly colored abstract photographs alongside minimal, totemic sculptures made of pigmented concrete and painted plaster and wood. Intensifying her approach to colour and pattern, VanDerBeek draws from the improvisational yet ordered compositions of American quilts, Pre-Colombian textiles and ceramics, as well as modernist textiles and weaving. The artist uses these elements to consider the historically feminist dialectic of “women’s work” and creative traditions associated with the term. The compositions in VanDerBeek’s photographs comprise layered images of her own geometric plaster sculptures and their shadows. Photographing these simple white primary forms outdoors against a white background to exploit shifting angles of light, VanDerBeek then layers these images multiple times during the printing process to make larger patterns of projected and receding space. The final colors within the images are rendered by an amalgam of digital and chromogenic printing processes.

Info, Metro Pictures Gallery, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 15/9-29/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com