Emerging contemporary artists - selected so you don't have to...

Tove Storch

Practice: sculpture

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Danish artist Tove Storch's minimalist lines and strong material focus appear to reflect the formal concerns of much recent sculpture, albeit with unusually authoritative, elegant results.

Less commonplace, however, is the artist's investigation of sculptural physicality, which takes her into territories where volume, form or shape are subject to constant interrogation and unusual uncertainties.

A series of block-like forms adopt monolithic dimensions and appearance, but in fact consist of light steel frames swathed in a skin of silk.

The discrepancy between stolid monumentality and fragile fabrication upends assumptions regarding physical presence. Similar tactics animate our experience of a large boulder which, on close inspection, reveals a hollowed out interior; a reversal of this conceit occurs in Storch's formidable Concrete Sheets, in which delicately 'paper-thin' structures are cast in heavy cement.

In other works, Storch seeks to alter the apparent reality of form itself: a slide projected onto a simple wood and paper cube insistently prompts the viewer to perceive a far more complex shape, despite clear evidence of Storch's working process. And a spinning thaumatrope endows a two-dimensional hummingbird with illusory, transient, volume and flight.

Fabrics such as satin and silk assume a particularly important role in Stove's work. As well as providing obvious counterpoints to far denser, weightier materials, additional qualities such as semi-transparency allow the artist to further her interest in trompe l'oeil trickery.

Gauzes are frequently layered to create subtly nuanced shading and blends of colour; simple plinths draped in gold or silver satin masquerade as 'Metal Objects', the lustre of the draped fabric providing unsettlingly close approximations of a hard metallic sheen.

Occupying a creative space somewhere between Fred Sandback's mass-free delineations and the conceptual object-building of artists such as Falke Pisano, Tove Storch's work provides an excitingly fresh consideration of the form sculpture can take - or even just appear to.