Transcending Fields exhibits at Mana Contemporary

Mana Contemporary is the first institution in the United States to present a sweeping survey of works by Ruth Hardinger (b. 1950), whose New York-based practice spans some 50 years. Transcending Fields, comprising over 60 abstract sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, brings together the artist’s most definitive creations, many alluding to ancient sites, esoteric spiritual practices, and the universal human practice of making art for the sake for remembrance.

Throughout her decades-long career, Hardinger has challenged the conventions of sculpture, yet honored all artists, regardless of culture or period, who share her drive to understand the world through its substances and forms, and who leave behind enduring signs of that vital engagement. Her choice of materials is essential to the dialectical themes in her work: permanence versus ephemerality, essence versus mutability, the known versus the unknowable. As the show’s guide sheet observes, “Her deft handling of ‘poor materials’—concrete, string, cardboard, graphite, rope, even dried foodstuff—suggests a kind of transubstantiation, an impulse to transcend the mundane, through artistry and evoke the eternal and sublime.” These impulses, and this remarkable body of work, are rendered particularly poignant by the artist’s current battle with clinically progressive memory loss.