Tripart Hexaplane Construction No. 2 2002–6

Throughout his career, Bornstein approached his work as constantly evolving, a continual search for ways to convey the vitality of nature. This approach is exemplified in a new series of free-standing works that he initiated in the early 2000s, which he would call Tripart Hexaplane Constructions. They grew out of his concept for an earlier work entitled Four Part Double Plane Structurist Relief, 1980, which was suspended at Wascana Place in Regina. Bornstein had constructed that work by backing four 90-degree angled double-plane reliefs up against one another, and he revisited this approach around the turn of the millennium, striking a new idea for the Tripart Hexaplane Constructions that characterized his late work.

Tripart Hexaplane Construction No. 2 was installed at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 2007. It is assembled from three green 2-metre-high 120-degree double-plane reliefs backed onto one another and elevated from its thin pedestal by short unpainted aluminum legs. The pedestal is in turn raised on a concrete base to a height just above eye level. To view it is to walk around it, parsing and comparing its three faces, like variations on a theme. Its tall, narrow, vertical relief planes shoot upward or drop downward, defying the edges of their supportive ground planes. Smaller, obliquely angled, blue-shaded rectangular plates set at varying positions harbinger a sense of restless instability always re-enlivened by the fickle light of the work’s outside setting, from sunlight to shadow, summer to winter. Tripart Hexaplane Construction No. 1, 2002–4, an earlier grandly scaled version of the series, had been previously unveiled on the grounds of Jacobs University, now Constructor University, in Bremen, Germany.

At the time of writing, while Bornstein still has other work in progress in his studio, the Tripart Hexaplane Constructions, whether small or grand in scale, have come to stand as the culmination of his nature-infused abstract art.