Born in Mexico City and having grown up near New York, Edda Renouf now lives and works in Paris. She has been an important part of the international art world since the 1970s with works in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the British Museum, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The most recent paintings shown in this exhibition take their inspiration from the city of London and especially the River Thames. Renouf relates different moments of her walking the Thames to specific paintings: The meeting of sky and river is expressed in River-Sky Encounter, her crossing the river at noon in Noon Passage, the scale and impact of Tower Bridge in Night Bridge and Open Terrain as a reminder that the river draws its path right into the earth.
Renouf's working process is unique. In her paintings, after holding a stretched canvas up to the light, which allows her to see the movement of the weave, she is inspired to remove certain threads. She brushes on thin glazes of paint and then sands the surface that again makes visible the life within the linen. In her drawings she incises lines with an etching point to remove particles of paper (see Structure Change of Incised Lines, 2011 series). In some works she also applies several layers of chalk or oil pastel to then re-incise or scrape lines that reveal the essential qualities of the paper.
‘Breaking away from the traditional approach to linen and paper, which are usually used as grounds on which to paint an image, my working process reveals and uncovers the life and abstract energy within the materials.’ – Edda Renouf
