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Mad in Pursuit
Sarah Rapson
Sarah Rapson
Mad in Pursuit
15 March – 20 April 2024
Modern Art is pleased to announce Sarah Rapson’s second solo exhibition at Modern Art, and her first exhibition in Paris. Rapson was born in London in 1959 and lives and works in Bridport, on the southwest coast of England.
In a world in which one can call up and access images with ease, Rapson wrestles with the space of documentation itself as an endless displacement and overlaying of exhibition history, applying black-and-white installation photography taken from art magazines to the walls and windows. In Monet, for example, a photograph of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies at Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, is attached to the gallery window, and a smudge of masking tape on the wall holds an image of an ornate writing desk in sans titre. These inclusions further capture the space between the abstract and the photographic, the speculative and the indexical – one edging into the space of the other as if joined in some libidinal art cult circuit.
– Chris McCormack, 2024
Sarah Rapson’s work – spanning painting, photography, film, drawing and collage - is made with a material economy of means that is present across her oeuvre. Her grainy films are black-and-white; her paintings are visually sparing in tones of ivory and black. Her wall-based works are made and remade from what she has at hand: house paint, tape, string, discarded packing boxes, printed matter, as well as more traditional oil on linen, or ink on paper. Declaring their own impermanence, these works incorporate found materials including newspaper clippings flagrantly referring to the monetary value of iconic minimalist works of art, and the internal workings of the art market more generally, in an understated and self-reflexive nod to the legacies of institutional critique.
Her distinctive tall and narrow canvases on hand-built frames that she roughly cuts together are the result of years of an exacting, contemplative labour at her home in Bridport, Dorset. At points, the jutting wood under the canvas or linen resembles a knucklebone or wrist; at others, the curve of a work as it pulls away from the gallery wall recalls a spine or a body stretching outwards in space. Arranged in pairs, quartets and sometimes solitary formations, the assembled works bring to mind recurring notes in a score of music or tombstones awaiting their final inscriptions
– Chris McCormack, 2024
She studied at Hornsey College of Art in London (1979−81) and L’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1982−3). In 1987 she left England to participate in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where she lived until 2004 before returning to the UK.
Recent solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna (2021); Modern Art, London (2021); and Essex Street, New York (2019). Rapson has participated in institutional group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); KW Institute, Berlin (2021); MACRO, Rome (2020); and Le musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (2011).
Related
Press release
Modern Art is pleased to announce Sarah Rapson’s second solo exhibition at Modern Art, and her first exhibition in Paris. Rapson was born in London in 1959 and lives and works in Bridport, on the southwest coast of England. She studied at Hornsey College of Art in London (1979−81) and L’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1982−3). In 1987 she left England to participate in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where she lived until 2004 before returning to the UK. Recent solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna (2021); Modern Art, London (2021); and Essex Street, New York (2019). Rapson has participated in institutional group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2022); KW Institute, Berlin (2021); MACRO, Rome (2020); and Le musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (2011).