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.