Rebecca Ward: Peter Blum Gallery
By Rachel Wetzler
June 1, 2025
Rebecca Ward first attracted public attention shortly after graduating from art school in 2006 for a series of architectural installations made entirely from lengths of colored electrical tape, which she wrapped, looped, and wove into dizzying Op-like configurations. These pulsing, playfully disorienting environments are carefully composed and painstakingly executed but also pretty gimmicky: The artist invoked high theory (in lieu of an artist statement, she reproduced Roland Barthes’s 1957 reflection on the semiotics of detergent advertising from his Mythologies) and discussed the works in terms of site specificity, ephemerality, and the phenomenology of perception, but the most enthusiastic reception came from design blogs and nascent social media sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest, not to mention fashion labels including Stella McCartney and Kate Spade, which commissioned installations for their stores.
Around 2013, Ward changed tack, pushing the impulse toward laborious precision undergirding the tape installations in a more subtle, challenging direction: hard-edged geometric paintings assembled from panels of dyed and sewn canvas, segments of which she methodically unweaves so they become gauzy and translucent, revealing the gridded silhouettes of the stretcher bars underneath. Over the past decade, she has explored the full range of formal possibilities enabled by this signature maneuver. In some works, the canvas appears to cleave in the middle, the bars peeking through like flashes of exposed skin revealed by the slit of a garment. In others, the disassembly is contained along the work’s edges, pulling back the curtain to show the supporting players behind the scenes.
Where her earlier paintings emphasized transparency, the ten new works in “vector specter,” Ward’s second solo show at Peter Blum Gallery, might best be described as studies in painterly depth. Rendered in largely monochromatic palettes of gradated jewel tones, the paintings featured tightly seamed arrangements of overlapping curves and angular planes, with a fringed band along one edge where the canvas’s horizontal weft threads had been removed and the loose warps tacked down to the stretcher bars. Ward’s process begins with digital drawings—the vectors of the show’s title—that she uses to plot the compositions, which are in turn projected onto graph paper to create sewing patterns for the individual canvas components. She then paints these pieces with an aqueous mixture of dye and acrylic and stitches them together to create irregular forms that tease at figuration—the curvature of a body or landscape—while resisting precise identification.
The crisscrossing canvas rectangles comprising hunger and hunger II, both 2025, range from deep maroon to fuchsia, eliciting a pleasantly confounding push-pull,while the shaded, blood-orange curves of bite marks and bite marks II, both 2025, evoke a waxing and waning moon. The cerulean sea creature, 2024, is dominated by a scrolling wave running down the middle of the composition, which seems to swell at the center like a roiling sea—or a pregnant body. In open secret, 2025, a hilly form in thin washes of teal is echoed by the thick strip of unwoven canvas below, only here the pale ground of the work’s upper register is replaced by the white gallery wall, visible in between the green threads.
Though Ward’s methods—weaving, dyeing, sewing—foreground the material particularities of the textiles she employs, and thus obliquely hint at a craft tradition historically coded as feminine, the results, with their luminous washes of color and subtle shadows cast at the seams, are far more suggestive of stained glass or mosaic than of domestic patchwork. At the same time, the works’ tonal modulation introduces the illusion of volumetric form, a fictive depth that sits in tension with the low relief of their layered surfaces and their literal involution of the space underneath the canvas. In confining her deconstruction of the canvas to a single edge of each work, Ward suspends the compositions in a state of protean incompletion, the paintings at once dissolving and emerging in front of our eyes.