Photo by David Maestre Gomez
For her “Newz!” series of paintings, exhibited last spring in her breakthrough exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery Overduin & Co, Math Bass created a vocabulary of unusual archetypes: seductively angled cigarettes, a simplified profile of a green alligator’s open maw, eye-like pairs of tubes, stepped ziggurat structures and other graphic shapes. Identical forms vacillated between appearing as hard-edged abstractions in one painting and as bodily and architectural fragments in the next, producing captivating and often humorous visual marriages of the graphic with the surreal. In the Newz! paintings one might conjure a face or factory from one constellation of shapes, and see the walls of an ancient yet futuristic architecture in another.
Bass is interested in, as she says, “the ambiguity of an object, its function and its purpose”. In the same Overduin & Co exhibition, she showed metal sculptures that evoked minimalism’s cool rigour while suggesting a more liquid idea of the ways we negotiate around space and with each other: waxed steel planes were bent over, stretched out, or folded into delicate steps. Tightly installed in the gallery, they suggested the tensions and intuitive delights of a flirtatious encounter. Bass often makes and uses steps, plinths and ladders as forms in her paintings, props in her performances and physical material for her sculptures. These structures suggest and enable transitions and connections across space and between bodies. Transformation, transmutation, transcendence: Bass’s work evokes many of these boundary-crossing ‘trans’ words in remarkable ways.
Text by Lanka Tattersall
“Off the Clock,” Bass’ first solo museum exhibition is currently on show at MoMA PS1 in New York until 31 August 2015
Taken from Sleek #46 Contemporary Collaboration
More: see other installments of our New Faces series