Susan Hiller

Katie Paterson’s drawing made from the ashes of stars leads us to Susan Hiller’s sculpture made from the ashes of paintings… Hand Grenades, from 1972, one of the earliest of her Relics series presenting the charred remains of her own previously-exhibited paintings in what she described as ‘quasi-scientific formats’. In the text that accompanies a related work she wrote: ‘Rather than announcing the death of painting, these works return painting to something nearer its performative functions in pre-Renaissance and indigenous cultures, where it acts as part of ritual’. Ideas around ritual and magic were ever-present themes in Hiller’s work, in 2011 she took part in our exhibition Mystics or Rationalists, a title borrowed from the first of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art which stated “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach” a description that perfectly described Hiller’s contribution to the exhibition of photographs of hovering figures culled from the internet and presented under the collected title Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein.