Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 2 (2020), via Bortolami
Currently on at Bortolami’s Tribeca exhibition space, Caitlin Keogh marks her third exhibition with the gallery with ‘The Waxing Year,’ a continuation of the artist’s investigations of space, materiality and time. Rendered through a series of intricate acrylics on canvas, the works speak to her ability to fuse imagined states and historical epochs with a deft sense of lyrical dialogue.
Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 1 (2020), via Bortolami
The Waxing Year paintings bring appropriation of historical material, always central to Keogh’s practice, to the foreground. The show is composed of new work that continues from paintings and collages exhibited in February at Overduin & Co in Los Angeles. The five large paintings on view here are an extension of the composition of the seven large paintings shown there. All together, the twelve paintings are an interpretation of one continuous collage and drawing.
Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 3 (2020), via Bortolami
Spatial constructions that could imply narrative are displaced in favor of the visual material (museum postcards, artist’s monographs, textiles, image search results, decorative arts manuals, cell phone photos) that Keogh accumulates in her studio. An expressive subject, as it might exist in the work, is not rendered through painting conventions of touch or voice or narrative sensibility; rather the subject emerges through an open process of acquiring, collecting, and culling, and is represented through the work-a-day, perfunctory line of a technical illustrator. These are works rendered from the archive themselves, creating juxtapositions of time and self, memory and history.
Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 4 (2020), via Bortolami
Unencumbered by an actual illustrational utility, the space depicted becomes free-associative, dreamlike, and subterranean. Much like the experiences of the past year, where time and subjectivity have gone through all manner of extensions and compressions during the experience of the pandemic, this show mines a space of experience that seems detached from the linear experience of time.
The show closes December 18th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Bortolami [Exhibition Site]
