Ruth Root’s irregularly-shaped works hang from the wall, interlocking and folding around each other in moments of tension and balance. Created in the lineage of artists like Frank Stella, the shaped canvases deny the pictorial quality of painting and instead assert their objectness. Root’s pieces question their own history, where soft fabric elements support hard, structural ones (the opposite of a traditional canvas over wood stretcher) and hand-painted elements layer over purchased printed fabric. Root’s work seems to exist at a weird crossroads of Pop and Minimalism, and at the wonderful, in-between place that is both painting and sculpture. Root’s work has been included in solo and group museum shows and is in the collections of the Austin Museum of Art; Bard College, Annandale-on- Hudson; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; ICA, Boston; LACMA, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum, New York.
