Ruth Root: Syntax for a jangled world
Installation Image: Ruth Root at Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. (Photos by the author)
Contributed by Jason Andrew
In an exhibition of ten new paintings at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Ruth Root extends her definition of the medium and her own personal language. Since the late 1990s, through a variety of “painting” materials, Root has charted an independent course through a Formalist-sanctioned medium, often rigidly classified by shape, color, and space. She is among the best pictorial pathfinders working today.
A self-proclaimed appreciator of both historical and contemporary painting, Root’s work lives in a poem-ic space reminiscent of Cubism’s architecture and Minimalism’s polemical landscape. “The paintings are almost like flattened sculptures that I have turned into paintings,” Root explained in an interview in 2015 during the occasion of her survey at the Aldrich Museum.
The new batch of paintings, all untitled and dated 2019, features a broadly explored theme of inversion and contrast. For example, two paintings are identically shaped and mirror each other. Even though this compositional strategy seems simple, Root has is able to distinguish the paintings with mark and color so that the phrasing of each is completely unique—variations on a theme of variations.
