SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Altman Siegel is scheduled to open Ruth Laskey’s debut exhibition with the gallery tomorrow. Evocative of gesture and movement, the newest works in Laskey’s Twill Series, Loops, continue to expand upon her ability to represent with thread and a loom. Seeking to subtly expand the boundaries of what is possible through simple weave structures, Laskey introduced incremental angles into her twill, altering their vocabulary to create the illusion of fluid, curving lines within gridded patterns. Laskey also utilized color in the background of her weavings to complement their gestures through shape – a major departure from previous bodies of work. Utilizing colors that one does not immediately identify, these mutable, ambiguous shades underscore the quiet elegance of Laskey’s looping forms. Exhibited alongside work from Twill Series, Circles, which feature distinct circular motifs within large swaths of color, Loops & Circles is a testament to Laskey’s precise, continued innovation.

Formally trained in painting, Laskey began weaving to explore her interest in materiality. Traditional painting felt too fast – she could apply paint from a tube to store-bought canvas in hours. Laskey wanted to slow the process and create more tactile, intentional work. She began by formulating her own paint and then took a weaving class to see if making her own canvas was feasible. This experiment sparked Laskey’s decades-long inquiry into color and form through traditional textile techniques.

Since 2005, this experimentation has grown and evolved as Laskey’s Twill Series. Using plain and twill weave patterns, the artist embeds the foreground of her images into their background, marrying two supposedly separate entities to create shapes, color fields, and gradients. She has also plumbed the Bauhaus ideology of creating work entirely from scratch, seeking involvement in every aspect of the weaving process. She hand-mixes the colors with which she dyes her threads, weaving these carefully crafted strands together to achieve form. Effortful and time intensive, Laskey’s compositions have a timeless elegance.

Laskey’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Huxley-Parlour, London, UK; Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA; Adrian Rosenfeld Gallery, San Francisco, CA; CAPITAL, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin, Germany; and Song Song, Vienna, Austria. Group exhibitions include Cample Line, Scotland; James Cohan, New York, NY; Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK; David Zwirner, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Ute Parduhn, Dusseldorf, Germany; The Approach, London, UK; and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan.

Altman Siegel
Ruth Laskey: Loops & Circles
March 7 – April 20, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 7, 6-8pm