About Us : Richard Deacon

Galerie Thomas Schulte is pleased to present About Us – an exhibition comprising two works by Richard Deacon in the Corner Space. The show brings together two distinct media that are fundamental for the artist: featuring an almost life-size stainless steel sculpture and a large, intricate black-and-white wall drawing. The works showcase Deacon’s mastery of material and medium, while offering a highly focused glimpse into two decades of his analytical form language and construction of aesthetic systems.

Through an interplay of surfaces, as well as orientational and directional shifts, there is a sense that things somehow repeat and yet always transform. Both the sculpture and drawing presented here are pared down in color; their lines and patterns are in conversation, contrasting and picking up on each other’s nuances and ambiguities.

In the wall drawing in black permanent marker, a jagged, stony mass seems to alternatingly protrude in some places and recede in others – mutating as though still coming to form. The hatching technique Deacon uses is also playfully executed to produce actual shifts in the process: it follows a set of rules generated by the artist, leaving space for different interpretations and outcomes with each installation of the drawing. The single polygonal form is composed of several smaller, irregular though familiar shapes – its lines of construction visible, like seams.

About Us, which gives the exhibition its title, similarly consists of interlocking shapes, or surfaces. Here, the lines demarcating individual segments are in fact spaces: slight gaps between pieces that keep them separate, while drawing them together into a whole. What might at first appear to be a simple geometric shape – almost a closed box from certain angles – becomes something more complex through changes in perspective and position. Like a cluster of pillars, the sculpture stands solidly upright, emphatically vertical. However, another, possibly more elusive picture is offered by its flat, horizontal top surface. The planes of its multiple components form a honeycomb-like tessellation, otherwise suggestive of cracked earth or stone masonry. Its open lines, along with the uneven, mottled, swirling white pattern painted on its sides, give the work a lighter and more porous appearance, despite a sturdy, monumental quality.

Supposed stability and permanence is juxtaposed with potential transmutations in both works – as contained yet open systems, with organic forms that are made up of sharp-edged geometries. At once afforded precision and flexibility, they are held together by the proximity and interrelations of their individual components. About Us is ultimately a delineation of structures – their consistencies and variations, the intricacies of their make-up – and the changing nature of our relationship to them.

Text by Julianne Cordray