Basel | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Hebel_121

David Tremlett: New Wall Drawings

7. Juni – 2. August 2014

David Tremlett, best known for his site-specific wall drawings, makes a new work for Hebel_121, transforming the front space with geometric shapes, applied directly to the walls using pastel pigments. Like all of Tremlett’s wall drawings, this work for Hebel_121 has been conjured up in the artist’s imagination, before becoming scale studio drawings. The creation of the final work is taking place over a few days, the artist and his assistant applying the colour directly, painstakingly by hand.

Tremlett refers to his work as objects, flat sculpture, rather than images which, for the artist, imply illusion. His compositions typically consist of geometric arrangements, abstract compositions of arcs, circles, trapezoids, text and line. While at once being formally constructed compositions of purely abstract elements, which emanate the sensual joy of colour and hue, and relationships between geometry and curved line, they speak too of things experienced by the artist, seen and done.

Like other prominent artists of his generation who sought to define a relationship between conceptual art and sculpture (Gilbert and George, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long among them), Tremlett developed a practice that was the antithesis of the aesthetic principles of modernist sculpture. He embarked on a critical examination of what sculpture and indeed art could be; an interest in the creative process of making, rather than focusing on a final result, is something which has remained constant throughout the development of his career.