Relief, Series B 1967

This pair of reliefs, part of Series B, are by Charlotte Posenenske, and made from sheet metal. The rust-red colour is kind of like construction girders, or maybe even a discarded car part? Up close, there’s an absolute precision to how these reliefs are made. They’re machine-like, without any visible brushstrokes or personal touches, and yet, the shadows cast give them a real depth. I think that in the way they are installed on the wall, they become kind of like abstract quotation marks – hovering there, framing the space between them. It’s easy to read them as two halves of a whole, almost as if Posenenske is asking us to imagine what lies between the forms, and what lies beyond them. Posenenske’s serial, modular approach reminds me a lot of Donald Judd, especially in the way her works invite us to think about space and form as endlessly variable and open-ended. She really makes you think about how a few simple forms can open up into all sorts of possibilities.