It looks rather as though some very large and lackadaisical spider has slung the first anchoring strands of its web across the Duveen Galleries and then left it at that. As the visitor enters, he can’t really make sense of the geometric tangle.

This is a work that takes a line for a long walk. And you have to go the length of it to watch how it develops into a series of interlinked triangles that glide, slant and shoot across the emptiness, articulating the serene Neo-Classical spaces, encouraging us to explore the architecture from a new set of angles.

Rothschild, ever since she came to wider public awareness in the 2002 Early One Morning exhibition at the Whitechapel, has been a name to watch. But for this, her biggest and most ambitious commission to date, she leaves behind the sex-shop rubber and shiny vinyl, the neon lights and the tacky leatherette with which she so often works.

Instead, she adopts a very clean, sharp, decisive aesthetic.

Cold Corners is not simple. You can’t say what it’s about — unless it’s a sculpture of a dropped trigonometry set. And the title certainly doesn’t help. Rather, Rothschild follows a line of inquiry that dates back to the beginnings of Modernism and its exploration of simple abstracts. She traces influences from Barbara Hepworth, for instance, who she acknowledges as a mentor, through the industrial aesthetic of Richard Serra or the perambulatory musings of Richard Long, towards her own work in a piece that, for all its simplicity, still feels contemporary. It looks more like a scaled-up, three-dimensional computer drawing than a conventional sculpture. But what it lacks in excitement it makes up for in elegance.

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