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Dorothy Cross, Red Horizon, 2014
‘Few colours have been so heavily freighted with symbolic resonances as red. In the Indo-European languages this may have been because "red" has been seen as the colour par excellence of life-giving blood. Indeed, the terms "red", "rouge", "rot", or "rosso" derive from the Sanskrit word rudhira meaning "blood".’ John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism
For the month of December, Frith Street Gallery celebrates the colour red with the online viewing room A Red Thread. Every day from 1–24 December we will post an artwork by a gallery artist that is boldly or subtly red, often accompanied by a text – a fact or a fragment of a poem – about the colour.
The works in A Red Thread are presented here according to the daily sequence on Instagram.
Click on the image to enquire about individual artworks.
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1 December
Callum Innes, Untitled from the Cento Series, 2016In Callum Innes’ works from the Cento Series, paint is applied to sheets of waxed paper and then removed using a thinning medium, thus allowing the contrasting and particularly luminous nature of the support to emerge. These pieces represent some of the most sophisticated explorations of the medium that the artist has achieved, creating a sense of visual immediacy that acts as a powerful contrast to his works on canvas.
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2 December
Polly Apfelbaum, My Hands, 48, 2017The series My Hands has evolved from Polly Apfelbaum’s ongoing experiments with glazed ceramics. They take their inspiration from the ‘floating hand of God’ in the mosaics of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna that she visited during a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2013. Apfelbaum was fascinated by this image of the disembodied hand as the symbol of creation and intervention. These works are in fact based on the artist’s own hands and made of glazed coloured porcelain or terracotta. To create them, Apfelbaum used her own hand as a template so creating a relationship to the artist’s touch while also dealing with ideas about craft and making, from prehistoric times to children’s pre-school handprints.
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3 December
Bridget Smith ,Odeon (red), 1995Since 1995 Bridget Smith has used large-scale, colour photography to explore constructed environments designed for entertainment and escapism, such as cinemas and Las Vegas hotels. These works explore the world of illusion and fantasy, often focusing on the details that go into creating the leisure industry.
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4 December
Fiona Tan, Vertical Red, 2018With a static camera Tan filmed the dense, night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her studio location at the Getty Center. Tan made a trio of video works, shorn of a narrative, that are a series of dream-like moving pictures. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. Viewed from afar, these cars, and their red taillights, are elements in a mesmerizing pattern, an undulating surface of pixels or brushstrokes. The vehicles could be stars in a galaxy, a shoal of luminescent fish, molten lava, or glowing fireflies.
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5 December
Anna Barriball, Vent I (small), 2016In Vent I (Small) the imprint of an air vent has been made using silver ink on rag paper. Isolated from its functional setting the acute shape becomes a sculptural form. The back of the paper is covered with fluorescent colour which glows around the edges of the work giving a sense of something behind the vent.
Drawing is at the very centre of Anna Barriball’s practice. She uses it to explore the most mundane and overlooked objects, from door panels to windowpanes. By meticulously tracing their surfaces with pencil or ink, she magnifies incidental details and textures created by everyday wear and tear resulting in works on paper that have a sculptural quality. Barriball’s drawings often seem to hide as much as they reveal, becoming more than just an investigation of domestic surfaces – she is interested in the invisible as much as the visible; the liminal space between boundary and threshold.
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6 December
Cornelia Parker, Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs), 2017Cornelia Parker's Bullet Drawing is from an on-going series which uses melted down bullets drawn into wire. A bullet’s worth of lead wire is then threaded through paper, where it looks like a pencil drawing, here arranged into a grid echoed with bold red lines.
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7 December
Juan Uslé, De Lejos, 2018Juan Uslé’s practice reflects on the possibilities of painting. His works possess an intriguing intensity borne from plays of colour and the nuances of pattern and gesture. Each painting emerges from the process as a very distinct character. Uslé’s rhythmic abstractions, constructed with translucent layers of handmade saturated colour, evoke the environs and energy of his homes in Northern Spain and New York City. In his paintings Uslé exploits the nature of opposites: between organic and geometric forms, randomness and order, and the simultaneous physicality of paint and its ability to disappear into sheer, ethereal surfaces and illusions of light.
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8 December
Nancy Spero, Liberty - Athlete, 1995Throughout the five decades of her radical career the American artist and activist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) placed the lived female experience at the heart of her practice. In this work Spero pairs a naked running athlete with the famous figure of Liberty at the barricades from Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. As Spero wrote in 1987 she was not interested in setting up an ideal or universal image of woman but rather depicting: ‘Woman in process, never a fixed or stable identity, women as a continuous presence, woman in motion – gesture and movement being the earliest forms of human communication – woman warrior, woman victim. These are female bodies – I use them to speculate on what is possible and to comment upon immediate events – political, sexual, rites of passage or otherwise.'
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9 December
Dorothy Cross, Red Horizon, 2014Over a summer, Dorothy Cross filmed skies for the set of the opera Riders to the Sea directed by Fiona Shaw at English National Opera. Composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams this opera is based on a story by John Millington Synge of a woman who loses her six sons to the sea, set on the Aran islands just south of where Cross lives in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland. That year, she photographed some of the most incredible sunsets she had ever seen over Inisturk and Caher island.
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10 December
Tacita Dean, Found Postcard Monoprint (Arrostook Potato), 2018In Found Postcard Monoprints (Arrostook Potato) Tacita continues to investigate her fascination with vintage postcards. She has used the postcard as a medium in several previous works, changing their meaning through manipulation or re-presentation. These pieces are made using cards from the artist’s personal collection which she has built up over many years. Each work is a unique monoprint, the colour and application of the inks reanimating the vintage imagery.
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11 December
Raqs Media Collective, Anonymous Steel Worker, 2007Raqs Media Collective’s Anonymous Steel Worker is a hand-printed limited edition produced at Artists Image Resource during a residency at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA. In Pittsburgh, once the world centre of steel production, there is an archive of labour in the steel industry called ‘Rivers of Steel’. The archive includes union leaflets, photographs and newspaper clippings, many featuring surprising objects from the history of the industry. One such object is a quirky ‘dog’ made of machine parts, odds and ends, made between shifts in a steel factory by an unknown worker. This ‘dog’, the pet and companion of reclaimed time, is emblazoned in a brilliant red as a heraldic tribute to the hours that an anonymous steel worker rescued from the pages of their factory time book.
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12 December
John Riddy, Shin-Fuji (Diner), 2005Mount Fuji has become an icon associated with Japan's cultural past and traditions - a link nurtured by influential artists such as the printmaker Hokusai (1760-1849) and the photographer Felice Beato (1832-1909).
Riddy uses the mountain as a precisely placed point of reference to suggest the sophisticated spatial awareness in Japanese society and the Fuji fervour of modern tourism. The timelessness, evoked by the stillness, the absence of people, the peculiar quality of light and Mount Fuji itself, is juxtaposed against the indications of a modern town with its geometrical power lines, stark red colours, flat signs and parked cars. These images explore the evolving relationship between town and mountainscape, people and nature.
Riddy presents Mount Fuji according to artistic tradition, but by including the town of Shin-Fuji he demands a new perspective, both perpetuating and adding to the myth of a mountain.
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13 December
Fiona Banner, Nude Pin Up, 2006This densely printed text work is a verbal description, in poetic but unvarnished detail, of a nude woman, posing in controposto, one hand on her hip. Banner has long been interested in the limits of linguistic communication, her early 'wordscapes' were written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in war movies and then of porn films. Banner began to think that the latter were like life drawings, only with all the rules broken: ‘They have very limited narrative: often no script, virtually no dialogue, just the hovering gaze.’ Banner prefers to work with subjects she knows rather than life models and lays bare the voyeurism inherent in making and appreciating a work of art. The female nude is of course a contested site in the history of art and women were once banned from sketching in the life studio. Banner has said: ‘We always come back to the issue of describing the human form. It's a way of describing ourselves – an attempt to stall time long enough to make some kind of reflection, not of the stuff around, but of us, the flesh.’
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14 December
Dayanita Singh, Time Measures, Sequence V, 2016Time Measures photographs have emerged from Singh’s long-term interest in the paper archive. Singh discovered these bundles of fabric-wrapped documents in an archive in India. The bundles themselves are of indeterminate age, their contents are unknown. At some stage these papers were wrapped in red cotton fabric, placed on shelves and then forgotten. Every bundle is tied by a different hand with a different knot to seal it. Over the years these stacked bundles have faded and become compressed. The knots, in combination with the forms and faded colours, gives them very tangible personalities, turning each image into a singular portrait. The title of the work takes its name from a poem by German writer W. G. Sebald.
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15 December
Daphne Wright, Plates: Patterned Plate, 2019Wright is interested in the ‘politics’ of the patterns found on the plates in our homes. These objects are both functional and decorative and are often passed down through the generations. She writes: ‘I am interested in the politics of pattern and what it means for different people. In many families, the best things had pattern, and they were kept in cupboards and used only for special occasions … In upmarket stores you can find refined pattern and colour, whereas in mass-produced stuff from supermarkets they have a very different quality. How much do you have to pay to get something that is designed properly, or with a bit of beauty? Why is it kept for those with money?’ Wright also taps into, what could be called, the emotional residue of pattern found on oft-used tableware. Fragments of memory, both and banal of meals with family and friends, and repeatedly doing the dishes or loading the dishwasher.
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16 December
Daniel Silver, Human 2, Red, 2020Daniel Silver’s alchemical sculptures are repositories of the artist’s multifaceted interests in classical sculpture dating from the Graeco-Roman period, psychoanalytic theory, and Western modernism. His figurative works, which range in scale from the diminutive to the monumental, always seem in flux – creation and entropy are equally at play. His bodies come to exist in the world / Dasein and thereafter return to a proto-linguistic or proto-historic state. Silver’s new cluster of free-standing ceramic sculptures were made during lockdown at a time of solitude and introspection. Hand-moulded by the artist in terracotta and subsequently fired and freely coloured with oil paints, they appear as totems, pillars, or trees: the axis mundi.
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17 December
Jaki Irvine, rrr, 2019Taken from Jaki Irvine’s multimedia installation Ack Ro’, rrr is one of 28 looping pink neons that spell out anagrams derived from the words Cracklin’ Rosie, the title of Neil Diamond’s song of 1970. Treating language as endlessly reconfigurable, the neons present this text as modular sonic components: repeated, distorted, anagrammed or spliced into their most elemental forms. Irvine invites us to contemplate this question: what if almost the only words available to us were the lyrics of a song?
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18 December
Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2014Untitled is from a series that traces the lives of those who have found solace, or refuge, in changing their last names in attempts to assume new identities or detach from former ones (the subjects range from survivors of brutal political turmoil to Bob Dylan). Gupta represents each person through a framed picture that has been sliced in two. The pieces are positioned near enough to their counterpart that viewers can find and understand the whole image, but they are also read as partial, alluding perhaps to the divided fragments that make up any individual’s life.
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19 December
Massimo Bartolini, 145 hours, 2014145 hours is inspired by a bush on the beach near the artist’s house; it represents a net that is an allusion to any complex system like communication or transport networks and the red could also evoke blood networks. The title is a reference to the time spent making this work, where the artist was absorbed creating it and meditating. 145 hours was made at Poligrafa in Barcelona.
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20 December
Callum Innes, Untitled, 2019Callum Innes belongs to a generation of British artists who continue to explore the possibilities of paint on canvas. Uninhibited by, yet very aware of, the achievements of the past and the rise of other media, Innes uses the language of the monochrome, an established format of abstract painting since the 1960s. In this piece Innes uses the simplest of materials to create an image which is closer to conceptual work than abstraction, so that intellect and intuition are powerfully combined. Here he chooses a middle ground between the spare beauty of a minimal aesthetic and the gestural panache of abstraction.
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21 December
Juan Uslé, Notes, 2016Although influenced by ideas ranging from philosophy to multiculturalism, Juan Uslé’s lyrical works do not aim to be in any way representational, rather they convey his personal vision, which is poetic rather than narrative. His paintings are not a window on the world but are an area of dialogue which he probes and explores. Uslé’s intimate watercolour works convey a sense of simplicity and vitality, they are in many ways a diary in abstract, yet they always leave the way open to the viewer’s own interpretation.
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22 December
Cornelia Parker, Red Hot Poker Drawing, 2009Red-hot pokers conjure up images of lofty flowers found in suburban gardens, or of the cruellest of tortures immortalised in Christopher Marlowe’s, Edward II. In the Red Hot Poker Drawing series, a domestic fireside tool has been made deliberately lethal, then applied with precision to a minimalist grid of folded paper. Due to the unruly nature of fire, the burned holes that form organic shapes, begin to eat away at the grid - thus offsetting its precision.
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23 December
Daniel Silver, Apollo (2), 2016Daniel Silver's practice is deeply influenced by the art of ancient Greece, Modernist sculpture, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Silver’s works on paper provide a delicate counterpoint to his sculptural pieces, this particular watercolour was inspired by the face of one of the shop mannequins which often provide the basis for many of his works. It is called after the Graeco-Roman deity.
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24 December
Fiona Banner, Pinstripe Face Bum, 2015Banner became interested in pinstripe fabric as the quintessential uniform or camouflage of those who work within the financial bodies of the City of London. The familiar pattern, designed to make the wearer blend in, has an almost op-art quality which Banner exploits here by rendering it in Day-Glo orange. She playfully depicts a bum clad in pinstripe suit trousers and sees a face hidden within it as one might on an ancient tree trunk.
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Callum Innes, Untitled from the Cento Series, 2016
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Polly Apfelbaum, My Hands, 48, 2017
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Bridget Smith, Odeon (red), 1995
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Fiona Tan, Vertical Red, 2018
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Anna Barriball, Vent I (small), 2016
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Cornelia Parker, Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs), 2017
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Juan Uslé, De Lejos, 2018
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Nancy Spero, Liberty - Athlete, 1995
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Dorothy Cross, Red Horizon, 2014
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Tacita Dean, Found Postcard Monoprint (Arrostook Potato), 2018
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Raqs Media Collective, Anonymous Steel Worker, 2007
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John Riddy, Shin-Fuji (Diner), 2005
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Fiona Banner, Nude Pin Up, 2006
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Dayanita Singh, Time Measures, Sequence V, 2016
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Daphne Wright, Plates: Patterned Plate, 2019
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Daniel Silver, Human 2, Red, 2020
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A Red Thread
Past viewing_room