Eva Rothschild's sculpture is nothing if not varied. Spindly aluminium triangles, tangles of bandage-covered plaster and totemic striped poles reveal both her eclecticism and her playful manipulation of materials. Rothschild has referred to her work as 'magic minimalism', which situates her in a specific tradition of post-war sculpture while at the same time indicating the alchemical nature of her work.

Born in Dublin in 1971, Rothschild studied for a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster (1990–1993), where the work of American artist Cady Noland had a profound impact on her sculptural direction. Leaving for Glasgow, where she was involved in the running of Transmission Gallery, she later moved to London – where she still lives – to study for an MA at Goldsmiths from 1997 to 1999, teaching at the Slade until 2007.

Rothschild is a prolific maker – her website lists a dizzying array of works – and her presence in UK public collections provides a snapshot of her practice across 30 years.

Early in her career, Rothschild became known for examining form and materials in sculptures made of latex, leather, metal, wood, tyres and Perspex. This is evident in a number of works she made for her solo exhibition at the South London Gallery in 2007, including Riches, composed of two black triangular Perspex panels.

The smooth surface of the panels is interrupted by criss-crossing rods in the shape of triangles which appear contained within the Perspex. The illusion of depth – the work is inherently two-dimensional – is enhanced by the dark reflective surface.

Elsewhere, the bony steel frame of Muscles (2007) supports a thick scribble of beaded fabric, the apparent softness of which belies its more solid construction out of plaster.

This work highlights Rothschild's wider enquiry into the links between drawing and sculpture, seen most obviously in Cold Corners, her 2009 Tate Britain Duveen commission. Here, the neoclassical galleries were overtaken by a huge zig-zagging metal sculpture made up of 26 triangles – described by the curator as being 'like a scribble in space'.

Also from 2009, Legend features three black Perspex triangles, each punctured with three large holes and connected to each other by similarly triangular, drawing-like forms which move around and through them. There's a balance here between weight and lightness.

While the geometry of Rothschild's sculpture engages with modernist legacies and the hard edges of minimalism, there is an associative aspect to her practice that moves it beyond the purely formal. Interested in ritual and new-age spiritualism, Rothschild has expressed her intrigue in 'how things are invested with a power above and beyond their materiality – the transference of spirituality onto objects.'

It's true that her works often appear symbolic; in spiritual terms, the triangle – a pervading aspect of her work – is essential to Christianity (the Holy Trinity) and Buddhism. Talking about her influences for Frieze magazine, Rothschild cited Lee Miller's 1937 photograph of the Great Pyramid – a three-dimensional triangle – which she described as her 'ideal image… of the imaginative and the architectural'.

This combination of the imaginative and architectural is seen in Stairways from 2011, the formal geometry of the metal rods – again suggesting a three-dimensional spatial drawing – coalescing into the shape of a star where the points of the triangles meet: a celestial nod to a world beyond.

Speaking to the Brooklyn Rail in 2017, Rothschild made clear how her work moves beyond purely minimalist gestures: 'In my own practice there's sort of a corruption of the ideas of Minimalism. I used to refer to the work as "magic Minimalism" because I really liked the idea of bringing in something sort of corrupted – the idea of magic, which revolves completely around belief – into something that seems so essentialist.'

For all of the geometry and angular structure of Stairways, there is another detail within this sculpture which suggests a further tension in Rothschild's work – between abstraction and figuration. The hanging metal rods are in fact supported from the ceiling by casts of Buddha's hands which give the impression that the installation is being delicately held aloft. This human presence is similarly found in the earlier work Heavy Cloud (2003) and the more recent Stigmata (2020), both of which also include hands.

Knock Knock from 2005 further explores this abstract/figurative relationship. The sculpture's structure, composed of a single steel rod that seems to open out into a cluster of apparently interlinked rods, calls to mind branches or roots – more so because as the metal rods near the ground, they are covered in black leather strips that are left loose at the ends, as though pulled from the earth. This fringe effect can be found in many of Rothchild's works, as though she wants to blur the edges.

Wandering Palm from 2011 – the first work acquired by the Hepworth Wakefield when it opened that same year – looks to be more of a drooping palm than a wandering one, collapsing under its own weight (the work is more than 2.5 metres tall). That the branch curves despite being made of aluminium reveals Rothschild's deft handling of material (making hard objects appear soft for example), but the work's use of industrial processes – particularly associated with minimalism – alongside more handmade, craft elements is indicative of her wider approach to making.

In a short TateShots video from 2014 – the same year she was made a Royal Academician – Rothschild talks about her choice of materials and articulates the need for some works to bear traces of the artist's hand. As she explains, in works such as Riches, it's important that there's a smooth, almost pristine look, 'but then other works should be full of touch so that there's a complete sense of the hand within them'.

She also mentions her pervasive use of the colour black, which she has described as being like a material, a unifying factor that contributes to the purity of her forms. In addition, she frequently employs red and green, strong complementary colours that both stand out and interrupt the black. These three colours in her public sculpture, Living Spring (2011), made for The Line sculpture trail in London, seem harsh in this natural setting, made more incongruous by the sculpture's formal resemblance to a branch or emergent tree.

Although Rothschild is not concerned with creating narratives or imposing meaning through her works, she is keen on bringing disparate works together in a group as though in conversation, so that the materials of each work play off against another. This approach was evident in her show 'The Shrinking Universe' for the Irish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Familiar angular steel triangles rubbed shoulders with what looked like polystyrene breeze blocks spray-painted in pastel colours and glossy black cylindrical tubes seemingly covered in corrugated card. Her mastery of materials is that she can make things look other than they are: Tombstones (2011) is another good example of this. Is it heavy or light? Is the title deliberately suggestive?

This wider sense of moving through disparate forms and materials is complicated by Rothschild's deliberately misleading titles. As she explained to the Brooklyn Rail, her titles 'are there to break the formality apart and to add this layer of language that misdirects you, perhaps, from what the work itself is doing'.

She is also clear about the experiential nature of her work and the need for the viewer to activate a space (perhaps explaining her wider interest in creating public sculpture). Her Venice exhibition encouraged people to linger and look by including seats and she's since cast exhibition furniture – tables, stools, benches. Her interest in how bodies interact with objects was taken to an extreme in her 2012 film Boys and Sculpture, commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, which saw a group of young boys completely dismantle her sculptures.

More recently, Rothschild has said that she's become less afraid of colour, evident in works such as the delicately balanced Technical Support (2021), composed of a stack of coloured resin casts of rolls of tape. A playful examination of space, the floor-to-ceiling column can be adjusted depending on the height of the room in which it is installed.

An exhibition in 2022 at Modern Art in London – her sixth with the gallery – showcased pastel-hued loops cast in Jesmonite (a recurring material), their delicacy standing in stark contrast to her more forceful black works. The forms find echoes in a recent print series from 2024, one of which – Garland I – was acquired by the Jerwood Foundation. Here Rothschild’s examination of colour and form – as well as her capacity to make a two-dimensional work appear sculptural – is shown alongside her wider interest in mazes and classical architecture.

Rothschild's most recent work, two large tapestries commissioned by Sadler's Wells East for their new theatre, further reveals the breadth of her practice. She has worked with tapestry before, in works such as The Fallowfield (2018), part of the Tate collection, and she has also probed the relationship between sculpture and fabric by making woven paper hangings (The Hooded I, 2007) and rugs out of resin (Felix, 2010).

The In Breath and The Out Breath were handmade in collaboration with the West Dean Tapestry Studio in Sussex (the colours were created for her) and they include the angles we would expect of Rothschild, as well as her trademark black. But in their vivid colours, which add to the sense of movement, as well as the circular motif and the nod to a half-open door, there is a symbolic, otherworldly quality also in keeping with her magical touch.

Imelda Barnard, Commissioning Editor, modern and contemporary British art at Art UK

For more information, visit www.evarothschild.com

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation