Relational Painting, 2026, Moore Contemporary, Boorloo/Perth, Australia

Relational Painting begins with a precise act of return. In 2017, Mobile Composition reconvened a now-dispersed art collection through a series of placeholders made in quilted black goat leather, restaging archival photographs and a historically specific choreography of the collection installed in situ. One of these proxies marked the absence of Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting No. 62 (1953), carrying forward only its title and original scale. This restaging unfolded at Maison Louis Carré, the house (now museum) that Alvar Aalto designed for Paris art dealer Louis Carré. Today, the original Aalto-designed furnishings remain, yet the walls, conceived as an experiment in living with art, stand empty. Within the house, the matte black works appeared as redactions or voids, underlining absence.

Here, Relational Painting No. 62 functions as a link between this earlier investigation of modernist interiors, collections and loss, and one in which ‘relational painting’ becomes an ongoing material practice. The work unfolds through assembly, bringing fragments into relation through alignment and misalignment, where meaning is contingent and produced through proximity. Quilting with goat leather, a recurring material within Yardley’s practice, intensifies this negotiation of abstraction – the works hold the logic of painting but behave as objects. Gridded steel fragments, integral to many of the works, extend this logic into the room, bringing them into dialogue with architecture, while the leather remains responsive and difficult to fully stabilise. Installed as a constellation, the relational extends into display, insisting that meaning forms between things rather than within them.

Relational Painting No. 18, 2026
quilted aniline goat leather, galvanised steel
136 x 98 x 6 cm
Photo: Lucy Dawkins