On display at Serpentine North from 11 October 2022 to 29 January 2023, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Infinite Folds is the artist’s first institutional solo presentation in the UK. This major exhibition runs in parallel to Monumentale: The Bronzes staged at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, until 5th February 2023.

With a career spanning over seven decades, Chase-Riboud’s innovation in sculptural technique and materiality is characterised by the interplay between folds of cast bronze and aluminium and coils of wool and silk which are knotted, braided, looped and woven. By combining materials with different qualities, such as hard versus soft, light against heavy, and tactile versus rigid, Chase-Riboud’s works lend an aesthetic consideration to the sculptural base and speak to the artist’s interest in creating forms that unify opposing forces.

The artist says: “The use of bronze and textile, playing against each other, establishes the heart of my work, a questioning of perception similar to that offered by Baroque sculpture as the conjuncture of folds and pleats of matter which seems a perfect description of my sculpture except that, contrary to the architectural layering, here it is the material that rests in these folds of the soul. Due to the play of materials, my works not only relate to an art of the oxymoron, skillfully combining opposites, but reversing and upsetting the established order and hierarchy of parts as only a true revolutionary does. My art does not cease making folds. There are all kinds of creases, pleats and folds coming from the East, the Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical, Orient and Africa yet it is truly the Baroque folds and twists and turns that are those pushing movement into infinity: fold upon fold, over fold, under fold, all pushing into the infinity of the fold. These are the unfurled folds of infinity. A double retrospective on two continents is astounding. I am thrilled to see my seminal bodies of work presented together here in the UK at Serpentine where Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling and Zaha Hadid have had important exhibitions.”

Parallel to her sculptural practice, Chase-Riboud is a distinguished poet and writer of historical
fiction. This month, Princeton University Press will release I Always Knew: A Memoir, an
intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae Chase, between 1957 and 1991. The International Sculpture Center (ISC) will award Chase Riboud with the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award for her exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture and further events in London during Frieze Week will follow.

Image: Barbara Chase-Riboud. Malcolm X #6, 2003. Bronze and silk on metal. Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan. © Barbara Chase-Riboud.