Serpentine extends the first UK solo exhibition of American visual artist, sculptor, novelist and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud to April 2023.

Serpentine has announced the extension of Infinite Folds, an exhibition featuring over 30 works by American-born visual artist, sculptor, novelist and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud. On display at Serpentine North until 10 April 2023, this is the artist’s first institutional solo presentation in the UK.

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 exhibition features a focused selection of large-scale sculptures alongside works on paper from the 1960s to the present day. The earliest piece in the show, Walking Angel (1962), depicts a hybrid being replete with wings that resemble leaves or an oyster shell.  This work is emblematic of the artist’s experimental approach to casting techniques, which in the early years of her practice involved casting figurative sculptures in bronze from an assemblage of found animal bones and vegetable matter. Walking Angel  also draws on the artist’s interest in ancient myths and surrealist influences that would occupy her later pieces which progressively moved towards abstraction. Also on display are Chase-Riboud’s early pieces Sejanus (1966) and Meta Mondrian (1967), a scale-model of the artist’s first public sculpture commission Wheaton Plaza Fountain (1960, now destroyed) constructed from polished aluminum and cascading silk that emulates water.

Chase-Riboud’s most celebrated sculptures from her series The Malcolm X Steles, dedicated to the legacy of the African American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was assassinated in 1965, takes centre stage in the exhibition. Infinite Folds offers visitors the opportunity to not only experience the ways in which Chase-Riboud grappled with the materiality of the 20 ‘Malcolm’s’ cast over the course of forty-eight years, but how her continued return to Malcolm X as a subject indicates his profound importance and legacy.

Works on view in the exhibition exemplifies Chase-Riboud’s mastery at assembling disparate materials and sculptural techniques to honour historical and cultural figures. Further exploring the artist’s fascination with ‘power as wielded by women throughout the ages,’ the exhibition premieres one of Chase-Riboud’s latest sculptures, La Musica Josephine Red/Black (2021), a three-metre-tall monument dedicated to the American-born dancer, artist and Civil Rights activist Josephine Baker (1905 – 1976), the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture and to enter the French Panthéon. Click here for more.Location: Serpentine North Gallery, West Carriage Drive,London, W2 2AR. Date: until 10 April 2023.