Regen Projects is pleased to present planchette, an exhibition of sculpture and painting by Rachel Harrison, Liz Larner and Rebecca Morris. This is the first time these influential artists have shown together, despite their parallel contributions to the reinvigoration of contemporary abstraction.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by a sculpture by Larner, V (planchette) (2013). This work, part of a series of blue-black planchette sculptures made with egg tempera-painted paper pulp, compels the viewer to move about it in order to explore its curling form and mottled texture. A planchette is a tool used in Ouija board séances, simultaneously held by a circle of hands: an object of communication that apparently takes on a will of its own, transcending the intentions of the humans manipulating it. Larner’s title is less about her sculpture’s passing resemblance to the traditionally heart-shaped planchette than it is about its capacity to command bodies around it and channel unexpected new information.

Negative spaces, imprints, absences, voids, inversions: the work in planchette is full of things no longer present, or things present but invisible or concealed. In Morris’s Tarp series, the artist recovers and stretches sections of canvas that have lain beneath paintings on her studio floor; while she subtly augments these quasi-readymades with intentional gestures, they also summon the ghostly traces of other past canvases. These drop-cloth paintings stand as metaphors for every artist’s relation to history, and for the interrelation of Morris’s paintings within her iterative oeuvre. Other compositions by Morris seem to pick up and put down patterns and gestures, as if testing out swatches of painterly effects that live more fully resolved elsewhere. 

Morris’s work finds an unexpected correlate in Harrison’s Infanta collages, which are part of an intermittent series begun in 2021 based on various paintings by Diego Velázquez of the Spanish princess. The pieces in this exhibition use Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Thérèse (1651–1673), which Harrison digitally manipulates. Her inkjet-printed screenshots of these modifications become the grounds for Flashe and wax crayon abstractions, which also often incorporate additional collaged elements. The glimpsed edges of buried windows function similarly to the rectangular lines in the Tarp paintings, indicating the presence of hidden content; indeed, Harrison’s expressive treatment of her source material also elicits obfuscation and occlusion. 

Throughout the work in planchette, elements are both hidden and revealed. Larner’s smile series is informed by various literary descriptions of smiles, by authors such as Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne and Mark Twain, but the resultant forms—angular foamcore constructions, cast in delicate porcelain—are scarcely representative of these absent references. Her Caloplaca Saxicola (2024) retains the impressions of unspecified objects over which a large slab of clay was draped before it hardened—forms essential but ultimately irrelevant. Other wall-mounted clay sculptures in her subduction, inflexion, caesura, mantle and calefaction series are shaped by extraneous forms, now gone: some push out; others are pressed inward; some slide into themselves. Their materials, too, hold secrets. In addition to ceramic glaze, Larner uses colored glass and stones to create textured incidents on their smooth clay surfaces that complicate binary distinctions between form and image. (The raised silver lines on many of Morris’s paintings, which suggest cartographic boundaries, encroach on similar sculptural territory.)

Harrison’s sculptures, which often feature roughly textured cement over assemblage constructions, likewise conflate color and form, substructure and adornment. They can sometimes feel as if they are modelled from color itself, while readymade sculptural elements (such as the sequined pants in Party Collection (2025)) function like paint brushed from a tin. Her sculpture The Prepper (2024) responds to the work of Alberto Giacometti, transforming it with an incongruous pastel palette; behind the figure’s ear, a hollow Sharpie pen smuggles such drastic emergency tools as a handcuff key, saw blades and a cable tie. 

The absent or hidden parts of works in this exhibition might be understood as intimations of the subconscious. As artists working in the long tail of Modernism, Harrison, Larner and Morris all embrace and acknowledge the art of the past alongside the noise and psychosis of contemporary culture. Remarkably, none makes work that can be understood primarily to be about the things it incorporates, or the narrative of its production. Instead, they generate their own languages, shaped but not defined by what they leave out, or leave behind.

— Jonathan Griffin