Los Angeles-based Math Bass plays with visual language in a tantalising dance of forms and symbols. Operating in schematic formal vocabulary, she is known for her flat colours on raw canvas that gesture towards Constructivism and Bauhaus, but fall shy of total abstraction; glyphs of ziggurat, crocodile maw or cigarette threaten to coalesce into an oblique dialect, wavering between sharp architectural graphics and recognisable icons of the everyday. Bass pinpoints the tensions between discrete elements within a given composition and in our wider semiotic environs, creating shifting, dynamic relationships that probe our ways of seeing. In the present work, the stylised outline of a Scottish Terrier – legs subsumed in a flat line, features elided – oscillates between representation and unreality, its smooth curves and points on the verge of becoming a graphic symbol or optical illusion. The result is a deceptively simple silhouette: as Bass says of her pictures, ‘As they begin to come together, they also fall apart’ (M. Bass, quoted in H. Braithwaite, ’A New Way of Thinking: Introducing Math Bass,’ Modern Painters, 31 May 2015).