Since Ronewa’s first collaboration with the Swiss-Tibetan artist in 2017, Brauen’s practice has covered photography, relief sculpture, works on paper and cardboard, and now painting on canvas – always led by an inquiry into reduction. He has explored reductions in pictorial space, materials, process, and color. The minimalist abstract paintings presented in Cover the Blank Spots could be considered the logical conclusion of this search.

Brauen has long held an interest in the hard-edge geometric abstraction and color-field painting of the 1960s. “When I look at my earlier photographic work, I see an approach to the questions that the artists from that era were pursuing.” His photographs of objects flattened perspective and eliminated the subject to the point of near abstraction. His more recent Crack paintings emphasized surface and materiality by imposing folds and tears into the structure of the pliable cardboard material. 

For this exhibition of paintings on canvas, Brauen has chosen two size formats and applied a consistent compositional framework across all of the works - a further exercise in reduction. Bold rectangular color fields lay hard against one another, their point of contact creating the tension that one imagines his cardboard surfaces held moments before they cracked.

The reduction of composition and surface texture is Brauen’s deliberate attempt to eliminate narrative. By leaving little traces of his own intentions, Brauen invites his audience to a viewing experience centered on the act of seeing itself.

Extended opening hours during Gallery Weekend: Saturday 29 & Sun 30, 11am–7pm.