Marita Fraser, Nancy Milner
Ittenology
Ittenology
Rook and Raven
7 Rathbone St
London W1T 1HN
22.01.-05.03.2016
Images courtesy the artists and RookandRaven
Drawing on Itten’s
treatise, The Elements of Colour,
Rook & Raven bring together the works of Marita Fraser and Nancy Milner. Through
sculpture, collage and paintings, these two artists explore Itten’s theories in
their juxtaposition of colour and its
perceptual contrasts.
Fraser’s work deploys a
means of rehearsal within its making, hybrid forms of materials, modern draperies,
displayed in variegated
configurations. Materials are often seen in multiple manifestations, on
consecutive occasions, reissued, reattributed and renegotiated. Painting is
often unpacked into three-dimensional works with wooden frames and fabrics,
referencing the traditional support systems
of wooden structures with stretched fabric. These frames simultaneously act as
dividers, physically framing her installations, as proposals in and for space.
Formal diagrammatic structures and repetition within fabric design are
referenced as structuring systems for creating images and spatial arrangements
of objects.
Nancy Milner’s practice is to construct paintings that fix colour and form in various, tense economies. Her work reflects the influence of colour field painting, pop art, and gestural abstraction. Taking drawings as a scaffold, Milner contemplates how superimposed colours can affect the composition in its entirety. The process is not pre-set. The painting grows and reshapes with the distensions of time, grasping for a legible equilibrium — a balance between colour and line, repletion and vacancy.
Nancy Milner’s practice is to construct paintings that fix colour and form in various, tense economies. Her work reflects the influence of colour field painting, pop art, and gestural abstraction. Taking drawings as a scaffold, Milner contemplates how superimposed colours can affect the composition in its entirety. The process is not pre-set. The painting grows and reshapes with the distensions of time, grasping for a legible equilibrium — a balance between colour and line, repletion and vacancy.
Taking the idea of the scaffold and literally drawing on the ideas of
form addressed by both artists, Fraser will build site specific frames on
which, and through which other works will be viewed. Alongside her three
dimensional works, Fraser’s practice is simultaneously about the whole image
and obscuring the viewers reading – her collage works are populated by
insertions of black material over black and white images, both figurative and
not.