Artist: Rebecca Ward

Ronchini presents lighter later, an exhibition of all-new works by Brooklyn-based artist Rebecca Ward, marking the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Ward’s practice operates at the intersection of painting, sculpture and craft, uprooting conventional distinctions between medium, surface and structure.

Over the past decade, Ward has garnered critical acclaim for her sewn and deconstructed canvases. She produces geometrically grounded compositions distinguished by a visual language that foregrounds process, materiality and spatial harmony. Emerging through a sustained dialogue between the digital and handmade, Ward’s works are realised through a meticulous and labour intensive process. Compositions are first developed digitally before being re-articulated in pastel on graph paper. The artist then measures, cuts and unweaves the canvas, subsequently painting and re-sewing its fragments by hand. The reassembled surface is stretched over its support, revealing and concealing the multidimensional properties of the canvas and the underlying architecture of the stretcher bars. Through this process, the pictorial plane becomes a site of both construction and disruption.

In this exhibition, each work adopts a saturated, near-monochromatic palette and the installation of works stages unexpected chromatic adjacencies that allow colour to function as atmosphere and force. Ward mobilises the interplay of arcs and axes not as oppositional categories, but to destabilize binaries altogether. Linear and curved elements intersect and overlap one another, suggesting identity as relational, provisional and continually in flux.

On view during the summer solstice, the exhibition’s title references how light operates as both subject and structuring principle. Shadows are cast, diffused and reconstituted across the surface, producing ghosted geometries that hover between presence and disappearance.

Fragmented within the translucency of the unwoven canvas, these silhouettes resist stasis. They emerge as contingent effects of light and shifting temporal forms that echo the mutable architectures through which we interpret reality. Ward’s works entice viewers to closely investigate contrasts in line and material, modulations in colour, and multi-dimensional layers in an elegant play of contrast and chromaticity.