Amalie Jakobsen and Emily Ludwig Shaffer : Zig Zag
Future Gallery is proud to present Zig Zag featuring works by Amalie Jakobsen and Emily Ludwig Shaffer. Zig Zag brings together the work of the two artists whose practices are grounded in a rigorous engagement with color, space, and constructed environments. Working across sculpture and painting, respectively, Jakobsen and Shaffer develop distinct yet resonant approaches to how form is perceived, navigated, and experienced.
Both artists work with a visual language defined by clarity of form, sharply delineated edges, and color as a primary structuring device—recalling the legacies of postwar geometric abstraction, including the Hard Edge movement. In their work, however, color is never merely descriptive or decorative; it operates as a generative force, actively shaping spatial relationships and directing perception.
Jakobsen’s sculptural works operate as spatial propositions. Through precise arrangements of form, material, and color, she constructs environments that extend beyond the object itself, activating the surrounding space. Her use of color is highly calibrated: hues are chosen not only for their visual intensity but for how they interact across surfaces, edges, and sightlines. In this sense, color unfolds relationally—shifting in intensity and perception as forms intersect and repeat—recalling Josef Albers’s investigations into the interaction and progression of color. Dispersed into three dimensions, these relationships guide movement, structure rhythm, and subtly choreograph the viewer’s experience in space.
Shaffer’s paintings, by contrast, use color to destabilize rather than anchor. Her palettes are deliberate and restrained, often built from closely related tones that at first appear stable. On closer viewing, however, these choices begin to complicate the image. Gradients suggest depth, while adjacent fields flatten it; cool and warm shifts create spatial cues that are then contradicted by the logic of the composition. Color becomes a means of constructing and undoing illusion simultaneously.
In works where architectural fragments, furnishings, or everyday elements appear, color heightens their ambiguity. A blue structure reads as both object and outline; a wall dissolves into a field; a figure becomes almost sculptural through tonal reduction. Rather than reinforcing a coherent space, Shaffer’s color decisions introduce a subtle but persistent dissonance—edges sharpen perception even as they destabilize it.
In Zig Zag, the exhibition title points to a shared sensibility: a movement that is neither linear nor fixed, but contingent and responsive. Though formally defined by hard edges, the works retain an organic quality, unfolding through subtle shifts and internal rhythms. Across both practices, color plays a central role in this dynamic, guiding the eye along paths that bend, interrupt, and reconfigure.
Bringing together Jakobsen’s physical constructions and Shaffer’s perceptual ones, the exhibition opens a dialogue between object and image, presence and illusion. In this exchange, color emerges not as an attribute, but as a method—an active agent through which form and space are continually negotiated.
