Roger Ackling

Born in London in 1947, Roger Ackling is one of Britain’s leading abstract artists of the last 40 years. He has exhibited at the highest international level since the mid 1970s and has works in public collections such as; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Geneva, Kunstmuseum, Vienna, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Tate Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Kunst Museum, Zurich.

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Ackling doesn't touch the objects he works on. Nobody does. He finds them discarded and washed up on beaches, their features salt-eaten smooth, or in skips, dumps or other wastelands - fragments of wooden objects with some forgotten purpose and history. His interaction is limited to placing them in the sun and determining the manner in which he will 'draw' across their surfaces by focusing rays of the sun through a magnifying glass, burning geometric lines into the wood. The lines are actually a series of scorched dots. And each dot is a record of its determining constituents; the fluctuating strength of the sun from one moment to the next, the steadiness of his hand, the physical demands of hours of absolute stillness. And, of course, the presence of any object which intervenes between the sun and surface - cloud, bird, aeroplane or passer-by - will be registered.  Bands of horizontal marks, burnt against the grain of the wood, are placed in response to the physical characteristics of the object, whether three dimensional characteristics of shape or extension, joints or troughs; or occurrences on the surface such as nails, holes, or the last traces of paint still clinging from its previous life.

Roger Ackling