Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015. WhiteChapel Gallery, London, GB. 15 January – 6 April 2015. Curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, and Magnus af Petersens, Curator at large.
From a review by Sarah K. Rich in Artforum, April 2015: “The antecedent for Ashford’s 2012 Many Readers of One Event installation was a New York Times report on the death of three boys who suffocated in the trunk of a car just yards away from where family members and police had been searching. Ashford reproduces the story’s main photograph, which portrays a father collapsed in someone’s arms in despair, and tucks it between two small panels that he’s painted in overlapping planes of color. Among similar paintings installed nearby hang photographs of different couples reenacting this collapse as captured by the mass media. (…) As abstract panels sometimes cover, protect, or hover on the walls near the photographs, the compositional elements within the panels become increasingly legible according to the features of human interaction – touch, intersection, transparency, concealment. As planes overlap and people embrace (and in the embracing try to imagine what other people must have once experienced), the images search for the places where connections between people and things might be thinkable. Without making hubristic claims to geometry’s universal legibility, but still relying on abstraction’s capacity to signify desire for cultural universality, Ashford’s installation contemplates a longing for (and impediments to) human interaction through empathy. The term was once posited as abstraction’s opposite, but in Ashford’s practice, and in this exhibition’s finest moments, it is a sought-after companion that might still guide painting into new realms of the social.”
Complete review in Artforum, April 2015:_(link)
Documents of Contemporary Art: Abstraction, Maria Lind, ed._(link)
Whitechapel Gallery website _(link)
Catalogue _(link)
