Exhibition
Aase Texmon Rygh
13 Apr 2022 – 25 May 2022
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Monday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Free admission
Address
- 45 White Street
- New York
New York - 10013
- United States
SFA Advisory, the Tribeca outpost of art advisor Lisa Schiff, presents an exhibition of sculptures by the late Aase Texmon Rygh, a Norwegian modernist sculptor who was a pioneer in her field.
About
SFA Advisory is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by the late Aase Texmon Rygh, a Norwegian modernist sculptor who was a pioneer in her field.
Texmon Rygh was the first artist to exclusively champion abstraction and subsequently veer away from naturalistic sculpture in Norway. She made this move ten years before Arnold Haukeland, who until recently has received credit for the development. Although her decision was at first controversial, she laid an important foundation in the country’s artistic history.
At the start of her career, Texmon Rygh developed “form principles,” where she became fixated on balancing the natural, inherent patterns afforded by different materials, with the sculptural depiction of figures moving in space. Her abstractions of the female form made in the 1950s stem from this interest. Progressing further and in the spirit of the Modernism described by Clement Greenberg later in New York, Texmon Rygh followed a path of formal self-criticism that was simultaneously being tread by other artists across the globe. Turning her studio into a laboratory to explore further these radical ideas, she moved toward smaller scale sculptures and experimented in various materials such as plaster, bronze, wood or even terracotta, iron, stone and plastic.
Eventually Texmon Rygh moved into pure abstraction, freeing herself from the human form and shifting toward shapes inspired by mathematics. In particular, she was inspired by the Möbius form – an unfixed and non-orientable shape where counterclockwise is indistinguishable to clockwise and there is no “right” orientation. In these fully non-objective works, Texmon Rygh attains a pure connection between material, construction and space. As aforementioned, these interests were echoed by her European contemporaries, such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, all of whom began abstracting the human form. Similar developments were being made across the pond with the emergence of American Abstraction in the mid-twentieth century; the vast move away from human figuration was being felt worldwide.
Texmon Rygh is also remembered for several monumental sculptures, many of which are in public Universities and squares in her homeland of Norway. The artist continues to gain international recognition and praise, particularly after being represented at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012. Furthermore, in 2014, Texmon Rygh had a dedicated exhibition, Modernism Forever, at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo. The artist’s work was last shown in New York at The Armory Show in 2020 with OSL Contemporary. The exhibition at SFA Advisory reinforces the artist’s widespread prominence and seeks to continue the understanding of Texmon Rygh’s important career in the United States.
Aase Texmon Rygh’s sculptures are on view alongside a selection of pastel drawings by Nicole Wittenberg. Both exhibitions will be open to the public from April 13 through May 25.