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Andrew Bick | Gate/Grid/Tree (Notes/On/Concrete)
Gallery von Bartha, Basel
Review by Paul Carey-Kent, April 2018
Any number of ghosts haunt Andrew Bick’s substantial show at Gallery von Bartha,
a handsome and unusual space converted from a former car showroom in Basel. The British
artist has a long-standing affinity with the Swiss, whose Concrete art traditions
– Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser etc. – chime with his interests,
and he had a major show in Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv last year. What you see at von
Bartha is nine paintings, one of them set against Bick’s own design of wallpaper,
and the self-standing sculptural construction of a triangle-heavy grid, an aluminium
design for a gate which can be opened to varying angles (though it is welded into
one for display). In a gallery setting, Gate / grid, 2018, invites comparison with
the bichos of Lygia Clark, so bringing Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement into the mix,
too.
Andrew Bick, installation view at von Bartha, 14 April - 26 May 2018, photo by Andreas
Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
Those works, like all Bick’s recent production, are a self-ghosting of sorts, for
they derive – as he describes it – from “a grid containing all of the linear decisions
within an original painting of mine, which I then turned into a digital grid consisting
of black lines”. That use of a source from 2007-08 has led to paintings which consist
of “triangles, rectangles, rhomboids, trapezoids, and a certain amount of gesture,
brought together in a process of adjustment… some elements will get covered up, some
will get moved, some will get revisited or reiterated”. That methodology is at its
most explicit here in those paintings, such as Variant t-s (dirty compendium detail)
#2 (2011-18), the dates of which indicate a repeated process of reworking and scraping
back – in that case to an emptier end point than many of the more quickly completed
paintings.
Most of the paintings are complicated, and what’s aesthetically impressive in those
end results is just how many different materials and means build up and yet are integrated
into harmonious wholes: drawing and painting; oil and watercolour; transparency
and opacity, through the use of wax in particular; line and plane; colour and non-colour;
gestural and measured; intensely present and apparently faded; glossy and matt; flat
and laser-cut sections which reinforce the drawings. OVGDS 135% (2010-17) even has
paint on the back, so placed that the colours applied filter through to the front
in the right light.
Andrew Bick, installation view at von Bartha, 14 April - 26 May 2018, photo by Andreas
Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
That ‘maximalist’ type of end result is apparent in four of the nine works. The others
variously stop at a simpler point, drain out most of the colour, or allow the translucence
of wax to take centre stage. In all cases, though, one senses that the underlying
driver is a wryly humorous scepticism about the various painterly strategies available,
as summarised by JJ Charlesworth (in Memory Club, 2003) as maintaining an awareness
of – yet avoiding – “fashionably disdainful cynicism” about the claims of modernism
on one hand, and a “naïve return to sincerity” on the other.
Behind that self-ghosting, again as in previous Bick shows, lie the echoes of other
artists and of Bick’s ongoing dialogues with them. Clearly the original Russian Constructivists
are in play, as are their Swiss followers, but Bick has also been a particular champion
of the British Systems artists such as Gillian Wise, Jeffrey Steele and David Saunders:
his relevant curations include Construction & its Shadow in Leeds (2011). Bick characterises
his approach as to draw attention to the Systems artists’ work and celebrate it,
yet also to take “a different and perhaps disruptive relationship to it” in his own
practice: a critical conversation rather than a stylistic imitation.
OGVDS - GW #10, 2018, photo by Andreas Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
That screen-like structure, and also the wallpaper, started life as the plans for
a commission Bick has worked on with MAKE architects and Derwent London since 2009,
which would have been near Tottenham Court Road but has now been cancelled. That,
of course, is mere contingency, but it does add to the ghostly sense that nothing
here is as was originally intended to be. Both screen and wallpaper allow the viewer
to trace the principles behind Bick’s paintings into forms which feed into architectural
in a manner parallel to earlier constructivisms.
Bick has referenced two specific voices from the past in this show: Robert Lax and
Paul Klee. His engagement with them is long-running and deep. Bick collaborated with
Lax for one of a series of joint artist-poet productions for Alec Finlay’s press
Morning Star in 1991, and corresponded with him regularly from then until Lax’s death
in 2000. Here concrete painting meets concrete poetry: Lax was an outsider figure
who developed a luminously minimal style in which many poems contains very few words,
but repeated and formatted in vertical arrangements to build cadences. Bick specifically
mentions the light — the shade, which begins by interweaving the words ‘bright’,
‘white’, ‘dark’ and ‘black’, before progressing to ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘dim’ and ‘bright’
and introducing some colour terms. The echo in Bick isn’t the starkness, but the
determination to squeeze the most from a given content.
Andrew Bick, installation view at von Bartha, 14 April - 26 May 2018, photo by Andreas
Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
Bick has frequently used Klee’s pedagogical writings as a resource for his own teaching.
Gate/grid/tree #1 (2015-18) combines Bick’s originating grid, as filtered through
his design for a gate, with an elegant drawing from The nature of nature. There Klee
explains how the architecture of a tree can be set out by using nine equidistant
lines for the trunk base, seven for its tapering, five and three lines for diminishing
sizes of branch, and one line for the endpoint twigs. Ironically, the only painting
in the show in landscape format’ is derived from two of Klee’s vertical tree forms,
laid on their side.
The intersectional complexity reaches its acme in OGVDS – GW #10 (2018). OGV is
‘Original Ghost Variety’, referring to the whole cycle of post-2008 works; 'DS' comes
from ‘Double Spider’, signalling a Helmut Federle drawing that, says Bick: “combines
geometry with a vague vase shape and the lines fanning out from intersections form
a spider-like web”; ‘GW’ is for Gillian Wise, specifically the isometric grid on
her pages of the Whitechapel Systems catalogue of 1972. Bick concedes that such
references become “wilful and obscure”, but sees them as celebrations of those artists.
That might be a problem were decoding necessary, but I don’t think it is. Bick’s
paintings can equally well be read as uninfected abstractions with convoluted indexical
titles; be assumed to incorporate a rich range of cultural references – an aura of
tribute, perhaps – without the specifics being hunted down; or compared meticulously
with the source ideas and shapes in a game which would identify the origin and assess
the distance Bick has moved from it. There’s a nice joke in how Bick always starts
a painting from the same place, yet ends up somewhere else; whereas much current
production cycles through variations made to be different but yet which are essentially
the same. Bick seems to find his self-imposed framework a liberating way of getting
at his interests in transformation without the distraction of inventing origins,
just as poets can find their subconscious helpfully liberated by the need to pay
attention to a rhyme scheme.
Andrew Bick, installation view at von Bartha, 14 April - 26 May 2018, photo by Andreas
Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
Coincidentally, a retrospective of Georg Baselitz, in celebration of his 80th birthday,
was on show at the Foundation Beyeler just as Bick opened. The German has spent much
of this century on a series of ‘remixes’, which one might summarise as revisiting
his themes in a sketchier, thinner, more fluid manner. Bick’s diffusions of prior
content contrast with that, tending to accumulate weight and content.
If all that that makes the show sound complicated, it has a straightforward visual
allure and finely tuned precision of making, which can be appreciated as an updating
of Constructivist traditions, independently of the detail of those back stories.
But is Bick enacting a broader agenda through the persistent re-use of forms? That
move could be interpreted as a statement – albeit at a conceptual remove – there’s
enough stuff in the world, so much that it causes problems, so he’s not going to
add to it. More substantially, I think, the work can be given a metaphysical construction.
Andrew Bick, installation view at von Bartha, 14 April - 26 May 2018, photo by Andreas
Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha
It’s easy to assume that you get at the essence of something by purifying it down
to a core. The persistent revisiting of a formal template sounds like a platonic
move, revolving round an ideal form. But if Bick is getting at an essence it’s by
circling round it. His project is more akin to a post-modern deconstruction: far
from being an ideal to strive for or protect, Bick’s is a fairly arbitrary choice
of originating point; the use made of the origin embraces uncertainty, hesitation
and revision; the point of arrival – if that’s what it is to declare a work finished
– has no sense of epiphany.
There’s the potential here for a melancholy undertow – origins are corrupted: we
cannot return to Eden. Bick’s variations, however, are playfully aware of their own
uncertainty and doubt. Rather than failing to reach an ideal, they accept the messy
contingency of the world for what it is. Indeed, you might go on to say, look where
the differently committed pursuit of some ideals has got us…
OGVDS 135%, 2010-17. photo by Andreas Zimmermann, courtesy von Bartha