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Choices, 2019

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About The Work

The American/Canadian artist Jessica Stockholder is known for site-specific works that challenge established boundaries, institutional and formal. Her work straddles many disciplinary lines, and she employs a range of materials and techniques. A recurring theme is the use of multiple, layered images to create micro-spaces within one’s field of vision, pulling apart the pictorial frame so as to include the larger context around it. As with her more well-known work, there is almost always an element of the objet trouvé. The mash-up of the intentional and the arbitrary is one of many organizing principles Stockholder employs in all of her works.In her first edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, “Choices,” these mainstays of Stockholder’s celebrated work are on full display. The archival pigment print presents a picture of a warped photograph that captures the shine of the original photograph even as it is printed on mat paper. The photo includes an oil painted printer, bits and pieces of paper, fabric, mirror, and tile. The space evoked by the stacked images is disrupted by a tear running through to the middle of the image. On top of this photographic collage, Stockholder has placed a drawn and cut-out hand, which together with the image of a foot that enters at the bottom left corner of the photograph, insists that the human body, and the handmade, be absorbed together with the manufactured objects imaged. As with many of Stockholder’s larger-scale pieces, this image evokes a radical opening, to the world, and to us as viewers.

Courtesy of TEXTE ZUR KUNST

About Jessica Stockholder

Recognized since the early 1990s as a pioneer of contemporary installation art, Jessica Stockholder uses a combination of paint, found objects, and architectural interventions. Her work erodes the boundaries between mediums, echoing color field painting and post-painterly abstraction even as they defy flatness. They are largely improvisational, using blocks of bright color as springboards to leap from one type of surface to another. As the artist has stated, "I began, and still do begin, with a love for color and unrelenting interest in the intersection of a pictorial way of looking, (or thinking), with the physical matter of the body and the materiality of things in space."

She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Dia Art Foundation, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her public commissions have included installations in New York's Madison Square Park and Chicago's Loop area. She is the recipient of the Smithsonian's Lucelia Artist Award (2007), as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.