Marjorie Welish
Marjorie Welish is a painter, poet, and art critic. Her paintings explore what she calls "the structure of difference." During the 1980s, Welish created four-paneled paintings which juxtaposed radically different orders of color and structure. She later began working in diptych, and presented the notion that physical difference is realized as formal difference. She painted one panel in a primary color, while the second panel subverted formalism by presenting the canvas as rotated, inverted, or whited out. Posing incommensurate logics in equal measure is of great interest to Welish. Her more recent works are paintings whose structure of difference presents two competing yellows, two competing reds and two competing blues, to pose the question: which is the true one? "The relative rather than the absolute condition of norms is thereby revealed" says Welish. Her series entitled Blueprint posits that gessoed canvas, color application, calligraphy and the grid that supposedly rationalizes the structural fold of a painting are of equal importance in a work.
Welish received her first solo show thanks to Laurie Anderson, then curator of the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center. She has exhibited in New York, Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, England. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including the Adolph …
Marjorie Welish is a painter, poet, and art critic. Her paintings explore what she calls "the structure of difference." During the 1980s, Welish created four-paneled paintings which juxtaposed radically different orders of color and structure. She later began working in diptych, and presented the notion that physical difference is realized as formal difference. She painted one panel in a primary color, while the second panel subverted formalism by presenting the canvas as rotated, inverted, or whited out. Posing incommensurate logics in equal measure is of great interest to Welish. Her more recent works are paintings whose structure of difference presents two competing yellows, two competing reds and two competing blues, to pose the question: which is the true one? "The relative rather than the absolute condition of norms is thereby revealed" says Welish. Her series entitled Blueprint posits that gessoed canvas, color application, calligraphy and the grid that supposedly rationalizes the structural fold of a painting are of equal importance in a work.
Welish received her first solo show thanks to Laurie Anderson, then curator of the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center. She has exhibited in New York, Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, England. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, The Fifth Floor Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding. In 2006, she received a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship to teach at the University of Frankfurt, where she also worked on a limited-edition constructed art book, Oaths? Questions? in collaboration with James Siena, published by Granary Books in 2009 (in the collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale, Columbia University, Getty Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art). In 2010 she recieved a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Edinburgh College of Art. Welish has published a book of art criticism titled Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960, published by Cambridge University Press. She is on the Board of the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), and on the Advisory Board of Satellite Berlin, which also sponsors “Paper Architecture: Urbanism” (a collaborative project with Olivier Gourvil and urbanist Muriel Pagès). Her art is represented by Emanuel von Baeyer, London; ART 3, Brooklyn, New York; Aaron Galleries, Chicago.
Courtesy of ART 3