Mobile Composition, 2020, curated by Andrew Renton for New Viewings #27, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

In 2017-18, Caitlin Yardley undertook a research project in the house Alvar Aalto designed for French gallerist, Louis Carré. Painstakingly researching eighteen paintings which formed one installation amidst a constant flow of paintings in and out of the house (in a particularly well-documented moment in 1962), she remade her own versions of the works according to the scale of the originals and installed them back where the ‘originals’ once had been located. Caitlin’s versions involved sewing quilts pieced out of non-reflective, black goat leather. She calls them ‘quilts’, but here they function in painting’s absence: “I think it is really important that I’m not making new paintings within the frame of works in the original collection. I’m more interested in acknowledging them as objects in the world; objects with a specific material surface.” The works were made to move beyond the house, and this new installation marks a doubled absence – the absent paintings as well as the absent house. They might be seen as echoes, emptied markers, signalled by title and dimension. But they’re handled. They’ve become something else. And in this installation the new works are removed from the context which engendered them, to a space detached from this history and point of origin. The renegotiation of a new space by means of these works is a highly materialised prospect. Andrew Renton, 2020