“I’ve always found humour both pleasurable and a way of breaking open things which are hard to break open; seriousness upon seriousness sometimes has its limitations.”
—PETER TYNDALL
TIARNEY MIEKUS: Your retrospective clearly captures a repeated shape throughout your work from the 1970s to now, which is a minimalist representation of a hanging picture, whether it’s singular, in a geometric grid, or even the exhibition hang itself. What compelled you to the image of an empty picture plane?
PETER TYNDALL: Early on [in my practice] I said to a friend, in a moment of lightheartedness, “If I put a line between this inside rectangle and this outside rectangle, we’d have the image joined up to its own object, or the object to its own image.” And if I put a frame around that and I hung that in a gallery, then that would be an image of interconnectedness. It was in that moment, in that work, that I understood in a profound way that everything was not a thing-in-itself, but part of a boundless interconnection.
Previously with the [earlier] abstract works, I’d been working within a rectangular format, which is the usual for painters. And I’d reduced the content of that rectangle down to an emptiness that many artists around the world had come to
