“I reject labels,” Barbara Chase-Riboud has said. “Creative artists don’t deserve them.” Heavy and light, solid and pliable, masculine and feminine, strong and delicate, light and dark, static and dynamic: The work of the eighty-three-year-old American artist and writer, who has lived in Paris since 1960, summons a host of competing, often conflicting associations. Walking through “Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds,” the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom, I began to think a vital part of her project is to create art that unsettles categories and assumptions—formal,

If the artist’s vocation is to be disciplined and solitary, alone with their tormenting visions, then what better model than Saint Anthony? The monastic figure in the desert, besieged by the devil’s temptations, has proved fertile subject matter for both artists and writers, from Matthias Grünewald to Leonora Carrington, the latter of whom came to that subject by way of Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 prose poem, illustrated by Odilon Redon.

It was Flaubert’s work that served as the inspiration for Martyn Cross’s recent “O happiness! happiness!” In fifteen oils on canvas, the artist invoked a sequence