Jessica Stockholder in Informal Get Together: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY

Informal Get Together is an exhibition bringing together painting and sculpture by Keltie Ferris, Joanne Greenbaum, Arlene Shechet and Jessica Stockholder on view from July 14 through August 19, 2022.  Taking its title from the 2014 sculpture by Jessica Stockholder, Informal Get Together highlights Shechet and Stockholder’s painterly approach to sculpture alongside Greenbaum and Ferris’s three-dimensional and structural approach to painting.  

Keltie Ferris has developed his exuberant and complex approach to abstract painting using a variety of methods including spray gun, dry pigment and hand-painted fields. On view in the present exhibition are two works spanning the most recent decade of Ferris’s career. HER*CU*LES, 2016 demonstrates his range of mark making, scale shifts and close ups. Ferris couples syncopated brushstrokes with airbrushed oil paint to create surfaces that combine the topography of textiles with the banter of gestural mark making—a signature yet ever-evolving component of his practice. A more recent painting, )))(((sounds)))(((, is a tightly worked, grisalle composition which brims with contradiction – meditative and anxious, visually expanding and contracting.

Over the past thirty years, Joanne Greenbaum has become known for a distinct abstract visual language defined by an unconventional layering of forms in a complex pictorial space. Often using drawing as the springboard for her paintings, Greenbaum formulates a vital relationship between the two approaches which ultimately reflects her own unique vocabulary of line and volume. On view in Informal Get Together are two largescale canvases from 2003 in which underlying geometric structures, recalling architectural details such as staircases or scaffolding, balance the intuitive with the systematic. A third painting from 2011 is indicative of the artist’s continued interest in the tension between figure, line and ground found within her earlier work.  

Arlene Shechet teases out longstanding tensions between object and base, interior and exterior, figure and space, combining formal concerns with a playful sense of corporeality.  Shechet’s painted ceramic sculptures are suggestive of contorted torsos or deep-sea-creatures covered in drippy and crackled glaze.  In Show Off, a small wall-bound sculpture, five tentacle-like arms curl downwards from the center of the sculpture, appearing to perilously dangle off it’s wall support.  A variety of surface finishes, from glossy and textured to monochrome and matte, force the viewer to consider the sculpture in the round and disrupt assumptions about the solidity of a sculptural object.

Jessica Stockholder’s works have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting.  She often incorporates the architecture in which the work has been conceived while merging seemingly disparate, everyday objects that create coherent whole compositions. The quotidian goods she often uses make use of the aesthetic and formal qualities of these often-overlooked items while orchestrating an intersection of pictorial and physical space.  She probes how meaning derives from physicality, and engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal order in an effort to call attention to the edges of understanding.