Pixelated Abstraction: Making Their Mark III
Juxtaposing textile art with digital explorations, this section reveals a dialogue between handmade and digital practices that redefine contemporary cultural expressions.
By Shah Garg Foundation
Carrie Moyer, Four Dreams in an Open Room, 2013
Making Their Mark: New York Installation ViewShah Garg Foundation
Pixelated abstraction
Works in this section establish a rich dialogue between the handmade, the mechanical, and the digital, forging new forms of subjectivity in a hyper-mediated reality.
Conflating body with African architectural motifs
Stick is one of three sculptures created by Simone Leigh for the Whitney Biennial in 2019. The work conflates the human body with motifs from various African building traditions.
Over seven feet tall, the bronze portrays a woman whose torso merges with a large, dome-shaped structure bristling with dozens of cylindrical rods. The figure is devoid of arms and ears, and her eyes are suggested only by subtle indentations—details that emphasize the importance of abstraction in the artist’s work.
Installation ViewShah Garg Foundation
Complementary textures, original shapes
Playing with paint and water
To create textural variation, Moyer thins her paint with differing quantities of water; she also uses spray bottles to saturate paint that she has already applied. As seen here, this results in bubbles, channels, and modulations across the surface.
Four Dreams in an Open Room by Carrie MoyerShah Garg Foundation
A physical experience
“I’m going for beauty, seduction, and play,” Moyer explains. “A physical experience, an optical experience.”
Say cheese!
Monumental in size, SMIIILLLLEEEE measures over eight feet tall, and was made without a brush.
SMIIILLLLEEEEShah Garg Foundation
An intuitive approach
Rachel Jones' use of oil stick—a material that can be “picked up and used immediately”—accentuates her intuitive approach to creating her work.
DunesdayShah Garg Foundation
von Heyl's collage fakery
Plato’s Pharmacy and Dunesday—with their intriguingly alliterative titles—illustrate von Heyl's sophisticated collage fakery.
Both paintings depict the same row of bowling pins (the second of which is actually a long-necked bottle) against a background filled with abstract patterning, envisaged by the artist as a “stage design.”
Bowling pins and stage design
Describing the works as a “goofy take on still life and metaphysical surrealism,” von Heyl likens the bowling pins to “Giorgio de Chirico’s tailor dolls—and here they are standing on the edge of the canvas in the exact same stupid way in both paintings waiting for the ball.”
RadiatorShah Garg Foundation
Embracing counterculture and feminism
Following her arrival in New York in 1975, Sillman immersed herself in the downtown counterculture and was active in feminist and queer circles. Like many of her peers, she was educated under the waning star of Abstract Expressionism.
Abstraction as a creative risk
Painting abstractly was not, Amy Sillman recalls, “the expectation for a female art student in the 1970s.... At that time it was basically like trespassing.”
V. Speculum (1970) by Jo BaerShah Garg Foundation
A duality of triangles in contrast
Seen from the front, V. Speculum features two truncated triangles against a cream background: one, colored gray, extends downward, and a second, black and trimmed with green, extends upward.
Deceptive shapes
"There can be,” Baer insists, “no mark within a painting’s format which does not deceive.”
Untitled #21Shah Garg Foundation
Perfume, makeup, and the hole punch
Howardena Pindell is known for employing unconventional materials in her work, such as glitter, talcum powder, and even perfume. Perhaps most important to the trajectory of her practice, however, is the hole punch, which she started using around 1970.
The hole punch, the artist explained in an interview, enabled her to pursue an interest in “very small points of color and light.”
Berlin Boogie #11Shah Garg Foundation
Documenting changing moods and the passage of time
Seriality is a recurrent theme in Koether’s practice, articulated primarily through the grid. This motif first appeared in her work in December 2000, when she embarked on a project to create a drawing every day for a year.
Berlin Boogie #11 is characterized by gridded patterns in Koether's signature color. Each panel, she has explained, is “covered in grids painted in various tones of red, coming together in an expansive triangular form, like wings, like cleaning the palette."
[//] (2014) by Jacqueline HumphriesShah Garg Foundation
Bridging abstraction and digital culture
For over four decades, Jacqueline Humphries has transformed the language of abstraction as a leading figure in contemporary painting. Renowned for her innovative works, she explores the interplay between abstraction and digital culture, highlighting the challenges and possibilit
Shifting POV
“Typically a person would stand in front of a painting to look at it, but I began to think, what if the viewer were the painting? If a painting looks out at the world, what does the painting see?”
Continue exploring the collection in Making Their Mark IV: Embodied Abstraction and Portraiture.
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