PLANE TO LINE TO POINT
BEN COVE & KATE TERRY
24 April - 23 May 2015
“As we gradually tear the point out of its restricted sphere of customary influence, its inner attributes - which were silent until now - make themselves heard more and more. One after the other, these qualities - inner tensions - come out of the depths of its being and radiate their energy. [...] The dead point becomes a living thing.”
(Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York, 1947)
Ben Cove and Kate Terry have been unintentionally collaborating to shape this two-person exhibition, their practices complement each-other so well that one would assume some kind of exchange has taken place, while in reality they worked almost unaware of each-other. Powdery paints and neon-bright lines are the building blocks for both artists: Cove mixes them with a juxtaposition of almost recognisable elements often borrowed from design and architecture, whereas Terry defines delicate geometries with painted wooden structures supported by a system of threads.
The starting point for Cove's work – both paintings and sculptures – comes from a bank of historic photographic images from a variety of sources: architecture, furniture, artefacts, interior spaces and depictions of the body. Nothing is lifted directly, but much is insinuated or suggested. In a series of micro essays George Vasey considered Cove's paintings and concluded that they “invoke a particular strand of Modernist Abstraction. If Modernism was a response to its own era's technological advancements (aviation, industrialism, and the machine) then Cove's paintings are at once heraldic and diagrammatic, provisional yet monumental. We could be looking at an unbuilt home, a logo for a multinational corporation or simply two lines intersecting within a nebulous environment.”
Kate Terry's practice encompasses sculpture, installation and drawing, exploring the relationships of points, lines, angles, and forms from their defining conditions. She employs utilitarian materials with economy and restraint, often disrupting our perception of depth, and of shapes and structures in space. Terry's sculptural works consider concerns of weight and presence with direct emphasis on their physicality. These geometric abstractions are reduced to succinct lines and planes of colour, and are often physically tethered by Terry to the spaces they occupy; tied by threads or propped, wedged and suspended from walls and corners.
About the Artists
After studying Architecture in Nottingham Ben Cove moved to London to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, recently he was selected for the London Open 2015, on show at the Whitechapel Gallery from July to September.
Kate Terry studied Fine Art and Sculpture in England and Canada, she is currently an associate lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts and has shown extensively in the UK, Europe, and Qatar.