Rita McBride

American artist Rita McBride creates minimalist sculptures and objects sourced from the world around her. She is fascinated by often-overlooked structures such as parking garages, stand seating, HVAC systems and cars. Everyday architectural elements and industrial products of this kind elicit both emotions and questions in the artist, which she is eager to share. For artists, asking questions is more important than supplying answers.

McBride became interested in sculpture in the late 1980s, as she felt greater affinity with space and form than with two-dimensional images. A fascination with Le Corbusier prompted her to immerse herself in the study of modernist architecture. She has been working at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and industrial design ever since, exploring how the built environment shapes our behaviour and how the formal language of modernism has become part of the world around us.

Her sculptures echo the minimalism of the 1960s and 70s, a movement characterised by the repetition of geometric forms and the lack of an individual artistic signature. But whereas the minimalists attempted to create objects that referred only to themselves, McBride strives to link her abstract forms to the world outside the museum.

Her work toys with both scale and material. By executing industrial designs in unexpected materials, she strips them of their familiar and functional nature. A parking garage becomes a monumental bronze work; a draughtsman’s stencil is transformed into a decorative object of chrome-plated brass (see Chrome Curves (set); and an air-conditioning duct is now a gleaming copper sculpture (see White Elephant). Through these works, she interrogates the distinction between art and everyday object: why is one granted elevated status while the other is not?