TORIE BEGG
25 April - 8 June 2002

f a projects is pleased to announce its first exhibition of work by Torie Begg.

A key figure, nationally and internationally, over the past decade, Begg has contributed importantly to the development of critical debate about the language and parameters of painting. Through the 1990’s her signature ‘Apparently Monochrome’ canvases, often presented collectively as elements of an installation, simultaneously questioned the language of abstract painting and presented themselves as candidates for a new vocabulary. Their rigorous technique of systematically re-iterated layers of primary colour (red; blue; yellow) and non-colour (black; white; grey) paralleled the structures of minimalism, but brought to this model a completely personal aesthetic language. In re-stretching and re-presenting the canvas, Begg at once re-assessed the status of paint and its relationship with its supporting structure and re-asserted its identity as a quasi-sculptural object.

Since the end of the 90s, this dialectic in Begg’s work has been expanded and underpinned by her ‘object series’ by appropriating ready-made objects - whether bricks, beds, televisions or shoes - as the supports for the painting system. By substituting them for canvas and stretcher, Begg reveals her painting process as one element in a complex conceptual syntax of appropriation and transformation. This exhibition combines such object series (TVs, bricks) with new work, which entirely rupture the ‘monochrome’ structure.

Recent museum shows include the Design Museum, London; Laing Art Gallery Tyne & Wear Museums, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne; and Museums of Paris ‘L’Art Dans Le Monde’. Torie Begg is in several private, corporate, public and museum collections throughout the world including the Pfizer collection in London.