No, there was no red.

25 October 2009 - 7 October 2010*

*Extended until 30 November 


Hannah Rickards, winner of the 2007 - 2009 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, will present her new work No, there was no red. in private preview at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia (Italy) on 24 October 2009 at 6.00 pm. Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, and art critic and curator Bina von Stauffenberg will be present. A conversation between Hannah Rickards and Marinella Paderni will follow.
The artwork, showcased at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in September 2009, has been acquired by the Collezione Maramotti and it will be open to the public at the Pattern Room from 25 to 31 October 2009; afterwards will be open in semi-permanent exhibition from 12 November 2009.
No, there was no red. is a two-screen film based on spoken accounts of a displaced image of a city seen over Lake Michigan as the result of rare temperature inversion mirages. The subjective divergences, consistencies, echoes and counterpoints of these accounts, will form the core of the piece.

Rickards often works with how natural phenomena are experienced and translated. In Thunder (2005) she stretched an eight second recording of a thunderclap to 7 minutes, this sound was then transcribed in to a score by composer David Murphy. The score was recorded and reduced back to the length of the original thunderclap. Another installation, exhibited at The Showroom in 2007, was structured around the spoken accounts of people who had reported perceiving the sound of the Aurora Borealis.

Upon winning the Max Mara Art Prize for Women Rickards was awarded a six-month residency in Italy, which was spent at the American Academy in Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella. This, together with funding received through the Prize and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, has afforded Rickards the time to research and develop the work.

Luigi Maramotti, Chairman of Max Mara comments, “I’m delighted that Hannah has achieved the specific aims of the objective with this extraordinary film. It is entirely the said intention of the Prize that artists can use the time and space created. Hannah Rickards is a rare talent and I firmly believe that the Max Mara Art Prize for Women has afforded her the platform and the time that will ensure the viability of her work.”


“Rickards highlights the human desire to speak the unspeakable…”
Coline Millard, Nought to Sixty, Institute of Contemporary Art, August 2008


Press-clipping selection

M. Paderni, Hannah Rickards, in "Flash Art", n. 279, Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010

E. Desiderio, Max Mara, premio "rosa" all'arte, in "La Nazione", 29 Oct. 2009

D. Scudero, Hannah Rickards. No, there was no red., in "Luxflux.net", Oct. 2009

C. Zampetti, Maramotti si presenta alla City, in "Il Sole 24 Ore Plus", 12 Sep. 2009