Victoria Miro is delighted to present Metamorphoses, the gallery’s first exhibition of works by Hedda Sterne (1910–2011) since announcing representation of the artist.
An active member of the New York School, Hedda Sterne, who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1910 and fled to the US in 1941, created an extensive body of work that intersected with some of the most important movements and figures of the twentieth century. A bridge between European Modernism, in particular Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, Sterne’s work stands as a testament to her independence of thought, moving freely between figuration and abstraction throughout her long career. Sterne stated, ‘I believe… that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing. What entrances me in art is what cannot be entrapped in words.’
The works in this exhibition are drawn from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1960s was an especially productive decade for Sterne, her work becoming increasingly abstract, minimal and experimental as the years progressed, while also drawing clear inspiration from natural phenomena and elements of landscape. During this period Sterne began meditating daily, a practice that would have a profound effect on her life and work. In 1961, she spent time at Yaddo as an artist in residence, and in 1963, she travelled to Venice, where she would live and work as a Fulbright fellow until the summer of 1964. Shortly after her return to the US, she purchased a property in the East Hampton Springs community, which became her summer home and studio for several decades, and where she was able to work on ever larger canvases, and experiment in profoundly new ways.
Works on view include important paintings from 1967 created by pouring thinned acrylic paint on to raw canvas, Sterne accepting the element of chance and then returning to the canvases to reinterpret and draw out the forms through the addition of lines or swathes of overpainting. She likened the forms that emerged to the dense folds of lettuce leaves, which for Sterne became metaphors for growth and metamorphosis. Contemporary with the Lettuce works, and a corollary to them, are drawings from a series Sterne would title Baldanders, an invented compound terms of the German words for ‘soon’ and ‘change’. In these, tightly formed objects are centred and contained in large, blank white spaces. Sterne began the drawings with loose movements, allowing lines to flow automatically from her hand to page.
