Mobile Relations

22 January – 2 March 2013

NUA is delighted to be the latest addition to a list of distinguished institutions that have exhibited Avis Newman’s work, including: Kannal Arts Foundation, Belgium; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Serpentine Gallery, London; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; National Gallery, Prague.

Newman is perhaps best known for her works on canvas and paper and objects that trace a long-standing preoccupation with ideas of origin and language. Contemporary perceptions and concepts of drawing are often central to her work.

Throughout the 1980s Newman’s practice explored ideas of scale, materiality and representation. Large-scale installations and unframed canvases – evocative of the limitless space of dreams and reverie – depicted fragmented, partially-realised forms. In the 1990s Newman’s work abandoned the emphasis on representation and the image, focusing on the tensions that exist between raw materiality and the immateriality of thought – and by extension language.

In her most recent works Newman explores an eternal preoccupation – that of ‘boundary’, the ‘unframed’ and the ‘incomplete’. Here the working process is described as a ‘configuration allowing for the work not to have an absolute fixity’.