Untitled

Ruth Root’s abstract paintings challenge the traditional boundaries between artwork and wall. In the present work, the artist exploits shaped sheets of thin aluminium, coated with an equally thin layer of enamel, to create the impression of a free-floating entity: a seductive abstract vision liberated from its traditional support. Extending the legacy of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold and Piet Mondrian, her flat planes of industrial colour and sharp interlocking geometries are curiously evocative of contemporary urban experience: of cityscapes and architectural façades, of digitised media and product design. ‘Like an invisible memory chip in a computer’s shell, Root’s paintings almost magically transcend our perception of their limits’, writes Nora Griffin. ‘The lessons of abstraction are back from the dead once more, this is time travelling in style, carried towards the future on their own private spaceship.’