The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky
Currently on view at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea exhibition space, the gallery’s entry in the annual string of summer group shows dives into the work of artist-turned-curator Melissa Gordon. Gordon, whose work explores shifting, ever-changing experiences in texture and materiality, turns her aesthetic sensibilities towards a broader selection of women artists, charting a broad trajectory of voices and strategies including work by Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman and others, all set set off by an architectural intervention of Gordon’s own design.
The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky
The show serves as a unique framework for both examining Gordon’s own work, and her aesthetic interests as they are posed against the work of her contemporaries. Driving at long-held artistic histories, actions, and symbols through a range of feminist perspectives and philosophies, her work is intended as both a confrontation and challenge to the canonical view of Modern art. For The Mechanics of Fluids, Gordon particularly explores her interests in the writings of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, particularly thebook This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) to create an exhibition that offers an alternative view of abstraction. Gordon’s work draws on Irigaray’s interest in fluids, in the flexible, adaptable nature of the fluid as a central metaphor, both in terms of the contributions of the feminine perspective towards abstraction, and the inescapable contributions of women towards its history.
The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky
Gordon draws on Irigaray’s belief in the femininity of fluids to demonstrate that abstraction has been significantly influenced and altered by the achievements of women, and selects artists that she sees as having an indisputable impact on the language and history of the central art movement of the 20th Century.
The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky
As a whole, the show’s featured artists equally connects to broader philosophical queries Gordon explores on gesture, and its relationship to the position and body of the artist. Gesture itself is framed as a liquid, as a fluid movement across the canvas inasmuch as it is a deliberate spreading of fluid, a trace of the same movement made from the material itself. The result is a series of artists whose work is as much an expression of this fluidity as it is of their respective sense of creative and technical prowess, as well as their conceptual rigor.
 
The Mechanics of Fluids (Installation View), via Marianne Boesky
The result is a show that takes the icon of the creative woman and turns it towards the body of contemporary art. Laura Owens or Helen Frankenthaler’s powerful senses of exploration and movement are paralleled by their dense scholarship and investment in the development of the field. The viewer is presented, in turn, with a series of converging and complementary histories, building a syllabus of the last century that rewrites and readdresses many of the central concerns of abstraction as bound up in that of the feminine identity.
The show is on view through August 3rd.
— D. Creahan
Read more:
The Mechanics Of Fluids, Curated By Melissa Gordon [Marianne Boesky]
The Mechanics Of Fluids, Curated By Melissa Gordon [Marianne Boesky]
