Jessica Stockholder: Snug Parting
Samstag, 21. Mai 2016 - 14:00 Uhr
Galerie nächst St. Stephan
Jessica Stockholder has been creating abstract and complex three-dimensional pictures that combine a broad variety of everyday objects since the 1980s. Her work is born out of artistic traditions like Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Pop art, and ready-mades and has continued to contribute to the dialogue between painting, sculpture, and installation. Located between the poles of pictorial effect and three-dimensional presence, her works lend meaning to the space they occupy.
Stockholder selects the objects she uses based on their material and color qualities. With the trained eye of a painter, she collects buckets, flooring material, fake furs, lamps, doors, and Lego pieces and assembles these with colored ropes or chains before creating a coherent appearance through acrylic and wall paint. The end result represents a complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture – between painted reality and the reality of painting.
Although the objects remind us of their use in everyday life and hence our own subjective experience, Stockholder?s works are purely formalist and abstract and therefore free from symbolic or narrative meaning. Rather, they represent a clash of different types of perception; they question our sense of reality, which we understand with the help of abstractions and systems of order.
The room-filling work Lay of the Land is a bold assemblage of large drop-lights, orange shopping baskets, wooden bar stools with convex traffic mirrors attached, and an oriental rug. The mirrors, which are used to make blind spots in traffic visible, bring an additional perspective and perceptual level into the work and remind us of how Stockholder keeps the remarkable variety of elements in her works in line. Lay of the Land was originally created in 2014 for the international art exhibition ?Contemporary Art & Design? in the hills around Piacenza in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. For this show, Stockholder has adapted the work to the dimensions of the first room in our gallery. On the walls and floors of the other rooms, we are presenting several other works by Stockholder that call our attention to the deluge of everyday objects, which she carefully arranges in her powerful and decidedly unsentimental compositions to appeal to our senses and worldly perception.
Jessica Stockholder was born 1959 in Seattle. She lives and works in Chicago. She was the director and professor of graduate studies at the Sculpture Department of Yale University 1999?2010. She became chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago in 2011. Stockholder participated in the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Whitney Biennial in 2004. She has received many awards and grants, including the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Anonymous Was A Woman award.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2015 Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; 2012 Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, Vigo, Spain; Musée d?Art moderne de St. Etienne, St. Eteienne, France; 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; 2010 Palacio de Cristal, Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; 2009 Madison Square Park, New York, NY; 2006 PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, NY; 2005 Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; 2004 Blaffer Art Gallery, University of Houston, TX; 2003 Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; 2000 Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Swizerland; 1999 The Power Plant, Toronto, CN; 1998 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes, France; 1997 Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway; 1995 Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY; 1993 Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland; 1992 Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster, Germany; 1991 The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL.
Selected museum collections: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Carré d'Art, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes, France; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain Limousin, Limoges, France; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Musée Picasso d'Antibes, France; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, Antwerp, Belgium; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The British Museum, London, UK; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.