The Brooklyn Rail

The moment you step into Ulrik, the exchange between Dorothea Rockburne and Hanna Hur feels improbably vast for work so compact. Folded vellum, trembling grids, thin washes of light: each derives its force from the body’s insistence—pressure, repetition, duration. Against the spectacle-driven scale of much contemporary abstraction, their smallness is not modesty but refusal. Through their devotional labor, these works open onto cosmological questions without inflation or posturing. Here, abstraction’s quietest gestures become its most radical, insisting that perception remains an embodied practice.

Although the exhibition is organized around the figure of the “angel,” what’s at stake is not iconography. Neither artist offers anything like depiction; instead, the angel operates as a perceptual condition—something summoned through time, discipline, and the structuring of attention. It also reintroduces cosmology into a lineage of abstraction that worked hard to expel metaphysics. Both artists approach geometry empirically, using it to examine relation, order, and the emergence of the image. The opening pairing—Hur’s Angel xi (2025) opposite Rockburne’s Small Trumpeting Angel: Parallelogram, 2 Small Triangles (1981)—makes this inquiry unmistakable. Rockburne’s folds read at once as bodily inflection and logical proposition: each crease is a hinge where manual pressure nearly dissolves into axiomatic operation. Hur’s grids, by contrast, resist geometry’s stabilizing imperatives. Their optical tremor is the record of endurance; deviation becomes an index of time in the viewer’s eye. If Rockburne’s geometry contracts toward a concentrated core, Hur’s radiates outward, redistributing perceptual weight across the field.

Installed centrally and almost icon-like, Rockburne’s pieces recall and pointedly critique the visual language of 1960s geometric abstraction. She resists the canonical lexicon of squares and triangles as universal units, generating instead relational forms born through folding, tilting, overlapping, and interruption. Small Musician Angel: Melancolia (1979) destabilizes the presumed purity of the triangle by cleaving it with a diagonally folded green square; the resulting form is not a symbolic apex but a hinge mediating competing operations of the plane. In Small Musician – Moon Angel (1979), the axis slips between a yellow square and a leaning dark rectangle, producing a precarious equilibrium that asserts geometry as something enacted rather than inherited. These procedures reflect Rockburne’s long engagement with set theory—not as abstract diagram but as a lived material action. In Study For Two Angels, One Hundred Years (1984), three triangular forms appear beside scenes from The Life of Saint Francis as members of a shifting set, their identities reconfigured each time they touch or diverge. Logic becomes choreography: a sequence of actions tested through the resistance of vellum, the pressure of the hand, the fall of gravity.

This positions Rockburne among figures like Mohr, Darboven, and Auerbach, yet she diverges decisively by treating mathematics not as a universal code but as a porous, embodied event. Vellum’s translucency and historical associations intensify this corporeal logic: it records warmth, absorbs time, modulates light. In Angel Study: Dark Halo (1982), pigment settles through the material as a slow deposit of hours. Against the masculinist austerity and industrial polish associated with minimalism, Rockburne advances a geometry grounded in permeability, in which accident, pressure, and duration remain irreducible components of form.

Hur’s Angel xiii (2025) offers a conceptual inversion. Its thin beige wash evokes East Asian paper surfaces—absorbent, breathable, nearly epidermal. The absence of visible brushwork suggests disciplined withholding, consistent with a Zen-inflected practice in which the image emerges through emptied attention rather than expressive gesture. Within this muted field, faint grids, wavering rules, and rows of pale graphite circles generate a quiet diptych structure. Where modernist grids promised stability, Hur’s vibrate under the strain of sustained attention, revealing order as provisional.

This dynamic intensifies in Eye and Eye ii (2025). The plane of grids is crossed by a centrifugal form that oscillates between iris and optical emanation. The structure recalls the mandala not as spiritual emblem but as an instrument for concentrating vision—a perceptual technology rather than an allegory. Against the painting’s cool grays and blues, clusters of red dots intervene as nodes of optical heat, behaving like afterimage halos that surface when perception reaches its own limit. They disrupt the grid’s formal authority, functioning as small insistences that hold the composition open. The painting functions as an experiment in thresholds, pushing vision to its edges. Through recursive mark-making, Hur turns attention itself into a medium; her images are not built through composition so much as accumulated through prolonged looking.

In their shared commitment to slowness, quietude, and the body, both artists reclaim geometry as a practice of consciousness. The angel, in this context, becomes a provocation—not an otherworldly figure but what takes form when hand, eye, and duration align. At a moment when abstraction often defaults to post-digital sheen or surface finesse, Rockburne and Hur counter with disciplined, iterative procedures and materials that stay close to the hand. Their modest sheets of vellum and canvas reintroduce warmth and intimacy, restoring geometry’s ability to probe perception’s deepest stakes.