LONDON.- Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Geometry in Motion, a group exhibition bringing together paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations which explore concepts of geometry, seriality, and order by a selection of the gallery’s longstanding artists: Tonico Lemos Auad, Jonathan Baldock, Claire Barclay, Tom Friedman, Kendell Geers, Pam Glick, Channing Hansen, Ilona Keserü, Yinka Shonibare, Clare Woods and Luiz Zerbini.

Juxtaposing geometric and organic forms, Luiz Zerbini's paintings explore the relationship between colour, light, and movement. Structured by a quadrangular grid, Zerbini’s monumental painting Crazy horse (2023) captures the sights and sounds of Rio de Janeiro; architectural forms, tropical flora, and vibrant patterns converge with kaleidoscopic effect. This sense of dynamism can be found in Pam Glick’s Box of Rain (2022) series, which translate the cascading energy of Niagara Falls into linear and gestural compositions. The pull between straight lines and sweeping curves conveys the waterfall’s relentless movement, while calligraphic pencil marks disrupt the paint, lending the layered works a dimension described by curator and writer Matthew Higgs as suggestive of “a form of psychological and emotional mapping.”

Trackwalker (2025) by Clare Woods explores the luminous beauty of stained glass, drawing inspiration from the historic architecture of Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery in London. Rendered with translucent washes of paint, the painting captures Woods’ ongoing fascination with the symbolic and material qualities of windows, acting as thresholds between public and private, light and dark, seen and unseen. Woods' radiating, circular forms resonate with Yinka Shonibare’s Web Painting (2003) – an intricate and visually opulent painting installation. A circular stretch of turquoise— over three metres in diameter — serves as a background to thirty individual panels of alternating ‘African' Dutch batik canvases and heavily gestured paint. Accompanying this work, an important mural installation Little Rich Girls (2010) comprises fifteen children’s dresses in spectacularly clashing batik fabrics – a playful vision of joyful excess, laden with complex socio-political undertones.

Channing Hansen similarly investigates pattern in his complex textiles. His hand-knitted works, generated from a single algorithm and often geometric in design, produce variations in colour, stitch, and density. The artist creates a tension between chaos and order by containing these hallucinatory compositions within the confines of the picture plane. Conversely, Longing Lasting 3 (2015) by Claire Barclay pares geometry down to its essential forms. Anchored by a small machined aluminium element reminiscent of two ancient fertility figures, the work cuts through the air with a sharp, angular line.

Ilona Keserü mobilises organic shapes as a defiant response to historical constraint. In Big Earth, Water (1985), repeating waves rise from the canvas, recalling water, undulating terrain, and the sensuous curves of the body. Developed in defiance of Soviet cultural restrictions after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, her organic abstraction asserts freedom through fluid, expressive form. This rebuttal of convention is mirrored in Tom Friedman’s Untitled (Adventure) (2013) in which a straight black line, composed of a continuous piece of shaped wicker, transforms seamlessly into a frenetic squiggle. Here, order is thrown out of the window.

Kendell Geers employs the inherent geometry of objects to expose social and political hierarchies. Title Withheld (Batons 64) (1994) arranges rubber police batons into a wall-based constellation, contrasting the objects’ violent associations with their visual symmetry. While Geers uses seriality to unsettle, Tonico Lemos Auad explores repetition with quiet, rhythmic tactility. In Gargoyle (2018), a hand-whittled honeycomb design — punctuated with hidden carved eyes — contrasts the inanimate with the anthropomorphic.

Four monumental textile panels by Jonathan Baldock hang in the centre of the final room of the exhibition, reflecting the different spirit and colours associated with Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Designs inspired by sacred geometry are sewn onto their surfaces, referring to recurring growth patterns found throughout the natural world, as well as emblems common in medieval church graffiti.

The exhibition concludes with a major new outdoor work by Shonibare in the gallery’s garden. Abstract Bronze IV (2025) appears to harness the wind, with the sculpture resembling a vast sheet of fabric billowing in the breeze. Adorned with Shonibare's iconic patterning, the work becomes a powerful metaphor for the movement of people and global interconnectivity.