Brigitte Radecki: Mountain of Sun

Text by Chloe Kinsella

Brigitte Radecki’s latest exhibition, Mountain of Sun, welcomes viewers to explore form, colour, and perception. Through a collection of vibrant works, Radecki continues her investigation into geometric abstraction, creating spatial experiences and compositions that allude to landscape and evoke emotional resonance.

The curated works demonstrate Radecki’s deft understanding of colour and shape. The bright, saturated hues and contrasting values offer a dynamic and evolving visual experience. The implied enfolding, or shadow-play, is achieved by her astute choice of shifting hues, creating illusions of layering and dimension.

The Erasure/Redaction series contrasts colour and value in a precisely gridded installation. The top row of works plays with planes of colour, creating oragami-esque shapes that play with perceptions of convexity and concavity. In the bottom row, the angular forms are mirrored, precisely anchored in the same position as on the canvases above, but the colour is redacted. The black shapes feel silhouette-like, emphasizing negative space and alluding to themes of censorship and unseen women’s labor. The interplay between the top and bottom rows introduces a relationship between colour and absence, form and void. The consistent gridded format of the canvases lends the installation a rhythm and a path for viewers to follow when taking in these juxtaposed works.

From a feminist perspective, Radecki’s work highlights the often-overlooked contributions of women to cultural production. Many of Radecki’s acrylic pieces extend beyond the confines of a traditional four-sided canvas, confidently asserting their presence as they float on the wall. This challenges formalist modes of presentation and the hierarchies that exist in the art world. Radecki’s work encourages us to question our perceptual and intellectual assumptions, abandon binary polarities, and celebrate the tactile joy of handmade objects. This is exemplified in the Flatland series, where planes of primary reds, yellows, and blues take on an object-like quality; cut from acrylic, they maintain their angular perimeter and occupy visual space provocatively.

Mountain of Sun is an invitation to engage with colour as an active, shaping force – one that bends light, contours space, and alters the very experience of seeing. In Radecki’s hands, geometric abstraction becomes a meditative encounter where simplicity meets complexity and stillness meets movement. This exhibition introduces modularity and the potential for reconfiguration, reflecting the artist’s interest in the mutable nature of perception.