Hedda Sterne: 2nd Floor Gallery

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce Hedda Sterne: Dreamscapes. Organized with The Hedda Sterne Foundation, this exhibition shares 15 works from the 1970s and  1980s, including work from her rarely-exhibited “Signs” series.

 

The paintings and drawings in Dreamscapes hold in common Hedda Sterne’s prolonged interest in the mutable character of line. Using thin horizontal bands, layers of soft geometric forms, or clusters of tiny abstract coils, Sterne built the illusion of depth through interdependent marks. Yet like the space within a dream coming in and out of focus, these works are not so simple; they contain what critic Dore Ashton described as “spaces that veer forward or back, or dilate from a seeming center, [which] are on close inspection, shapes that declare themselves ambiguous.”

 

One can view the marks in Hedda Sterne’s “Signs” series as figures, totems, shadows, or calligraphy of a secret language. They build upon the metaphysical spaces contained within her Vertical-Horizontals series, and presage the architectural forms that she would turn to for much of the 1980s. Visually linked through very small contrasts of color and a delicacy of line, the artworks in this exhibition highlight the thread of inquiry embedded in her art practice. “To reveal all these diverse meanings of line,” Sterne wrote in one of her sketchbooks, “it seems to me is what I’ve been doing these last years.”