catherine corman

MAUREEN GALLACE (United States)

at Los Angeles Review of Books

Maureen Gallace is drawn to lonely, tranquil homes and empty beaches in “Connecticut and Massachusetts,” she says, “places I know about from my childhood. Some of those places I have been returning to for decades.”

She presents a scene utterly familiar (a beach house, an ocean wave) while remaining at a cool level of remove. Seeing her work feels like returning to a place you know, as if under glass, or just out of reach. Her poise and subtlety, her deep interiority, keep us from getting too close. A dreamy vulnerability is protected by mastery of technique, the gloss of overflowing beauty, and deceptive simplicity. A first glance flatness makes you feel you’ve seen it, it’s time to move on, just as you hesitate, wanting to linger and be drawn further into this familiar/mysterious, placid coastal scene.

Gallace hinted at a reason for her endless repetition of the same few subjects, or perhaps a reason subject matter itself is secondary to a painter’s pursuit, when she said, “It is more about each individual work embodying a sustained effort, in total – refining and articulating painting as a language in and of itself… I am always trying to refine, which could mean both making things tighter or looser. So that is the simplest way to describe this current show… paintings in search of refinement.”

Her small paintings share a pale, muted palette. Made from snapshots, drawings and memories, they feel like catching your first glimpse of something, which is possibly linked to the immediacy of her process. “Once I start the painting, there is a very small window of time to complete it,” she says, “If it doesn’t work, it gets wiped out and I start over… This process can take several weeks or could be instantaneous. It’s a bit of a high-wire act.”

Gallace mentions Fairfield Porter, Jane Frielicher and Morandi as influences. Others draw parallels with Elizabeth Bishop, Alex Katz, and Bonnard. Her hushed intimacy conjures the quiet, reflective simplicity of the Nabis. Considering her paintings, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Porter “liked to argue that modernism went astray by hewing to Cézanne rather than to Vuillard.”

But Gallace finds resonance with Cézanne as well, saying, “I think he was trying to put everything that he knew about painting into each object. It’s hard, but I think it’s a real thing that some painters have: the need to distill things down, to get at the essence of what painting is.”

CAROLINE WALKER (Scotland)

at Los Angeles Review of Books

Caroline Walker’s childhood art studio was a kitchen cupboard where she routinely drew portraits of women. After her mother took her to an exhibit of Gainsborough portraits of society ladies in the Scottish National Gallery she began to paint. To this day she makes portraits of women, primarily in scenes of domesticity.

In her twenties, she realized her favorite paintings of women were done by men, and became interested in portraying women from a female perspective. She finds a fascinating complexity in domestic scenes, particularly considering the roles women play. Her subject, she says, “could be the owner, the nanny or the housekeeper for example. The house becomes less about a private space and more about divisions of social class, wealth and the roles that we perform.”

Walker paints from photographs, some of which are shot with posed models in carefully crafted costumes, often inside glamorous, soulless California homes. Others are snapshots taken surreptitiously on her phone of invisible women in service industries, working quietly and unassumingly as hairdressers, manicurists or tailors. In either echelon of society, she hopes to record “the reality of women’s daily lives in the space of the city,” incorporating her emotional response to what she sees into the documentary aspect of her work.

Her influences range from Degas and Manet to film directors like Hitchcock and David Lynch. Her interest in the representation of women in Western art has widened to include “reality TV, trashy magazines, and popular culture, which present different ways of imaging women, often where women are choosing to present themselves in particular ways.”

Realism is important to her. She hopes the viewer will feel connected to “a real space occupied by real people.” But her painting is also loose and abstract, often conveying a sense of emptiness or listlessness, a feeling of being vaguely trapped in a domestic setting or place of work. A pervasive sense of loneliness runs through her work.

There is a voyeuristic, cinematic sense that we are watching these women while nothing happens to them. Their private lives are opened to us, giving an impression of stasis and monotony intertwined with comfort, familiarity, focus, discipline, or mild ennui. These are women comfortable at home, or in their own spheres. In a way we are wrong to intrude, or would be if they noticed us. But in another way, we are wrong to ignore them, the women doing invisible work on which the world quietly runs.

This series “really opened my eyes to the idea of invisibility, of those overlooked lives in the city around us,” she says. “This led to me becoming interested in women working in… professions dominated by a female labour force, but which are largely taken for granted or, in the case of hotel housekeeping, designed to be unseen.” Her portraits of these women underscore their value. They deserve to be seen. And to be seen with such subtlety, empathy, and tenderness as her paintings lend.

RUTH IGE (Nigeria)

at Los Angeles Review of Books

Born in Nigeria, Ruth Ige moved to New Zealand and decided to stay. Now based in Tamaki Makaurau, she paints abstract portraits of androgynous black figures in flowing, luminous robes, evocative of a traditional, elemental culture.

“Using secrecy and mystery as a form of empowerment in the portrayal of blackness,” she says, “I want to create narratives of blackness that are enigmatic and not expected.” Her influences include African-American artists Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, and Charles White. She feels White “portrays people of colour with such dignity, grandness and sensitivity,” a compliment that could well be paid Ige’s own work. Immersing herself in the work of these artists gives her a sense of deep belonging.

Ige is inspired by abstraction’s ability to hide and create mystery, “a form of veiling,” she says. In discussing her influences, she says that the work of black artists, their contribution to the history of art, has often been hidden. Her subjects are themselves obscured; with no features, they remain enigmatic, just beyond reach, the lyrical sway of their silhouettes concealed by flowing robes.

Her palette is uniform with slight variations; her blacks are very dark, subtly ranging from ebony to onyx, coal to obsidian. Abstracted figures are painted in a dreamy, quiet collection of powder blues, French greys and paper whites, in varying tones of opacity. The occasional translucent indigo or ivory seems to emit or reflect light of unknown origin.

Her work is infused with a sense of intimacy born of silence and stillness. Ige describes her desire for “quietness, a slowing down and focusing in.” Her subjects never reveal themselves, but still allow a glimpse of the unfathomable, veiled world they silently inhabit.

(United States)

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Mary Simpson finds influence in Paul Klee’s watercolors and Alexander Rodchenko’s costume and theater set designs. Her dreamlike images elude reason. She describes them as strange and playful.

There is a ghostly quality to her work, the sense of an afterimage, something vanished, leaving only a shimmering trace. Though absent to us, it was present to her in the moment of creation. Describing this instant she says, “You reach for the image, and it’s there for you.”

(Germany)

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Julia Mangold creates smooth works on paper that are clear, spare, and austere. Her opaque layers slowly build intensity. Reminiscent of Wolfgang Laib’s dripped beeswax sculptures and Robert Ryman’s pale squares, her handmade geometries feel uncomplicated and quiet. They seem to form their own simple metaphysics.

(Norway)

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Margarethe Aanestad’s unsteady aesthetic recalls the Japanese principle of wabi sabi. Her freehand, improvisational work has a lightness and fragility borne of its loose imperfection. The quiet intensity of her minimal geometric abstractions composed of fragments and layers give her drawings a sculptural weight. Their simplicity belies a careful orchestration of density and balance, symbol and form. She says she works in an abstract language.

(United States)

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In art school Alyson Shotz was daunted by the monumentality of Richard Serra’s work, but over time felt closer to the torqued ellipses her work echoes. Her sculptures have also been compared to Eva Hesse’s primal minimalism. A student of geology, she grew familiar with microscopes and telescopes, leading to her meditations on point of view and the infinite. Drawing on theoretical physics, she illustrates string theory and dark matter. Never heady or scholarly, her work is brilliant, majestic, prismatic. Underlying everything is a fascination with cosmology and astrophysics. She immerses herself in these subjects, she says, “to think about what the universe is made of.”

(United States)

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Joan Snyder’s gemstone colors recall Cy Twombly’s palette. Her loose brushwork has been compared to Anselm Kiefer’s. Paintings of compact shapes floating in seas of changing tones resemble Monet’s Water Lilies. A traditionalist who trusts in form, her work is deeply emotional. Her understated paintings are simple, open and sincere. She creates lush, verdant landscapes with a few curved pastel lines on notebook paper. For the natural quality of such transformations she has been called “an alchemist at the easel.”

(United States)

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Anne Truitt felt she became an artist out of empathy learned working in a psychiatric lab and as a nurse’s aid. “People talk as if art were something that you did with your eyes and your brain,” she said, “but it’s not. It’s something that grows out of a ground.”

She wrote in her journal, “The more I observed the range of human existence—and I was steeped in pain during those war years - the less convinced I became that I wished to restrict my own range to the perpetuation of what psychologists would call ‘normal,’” She was drawn to T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. “I had begun to see that my natural sympathies lay with people who are unusual rather than usual.”

She wrote poetry and translated a study of Proust before turning to sculpture. Abstract Expressionists Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman inspired her. In them, she said, “I saw too that I had the freedom to make whatever I chose.” Her gentle gradation of color, born of the application of many thin layers of paint, was influenced by the faint variations of color in Newman’s painting. “I had never realized you could do it in art,” she wrote. “Have enough space. Enough color.”

Still she struggled with calling herself an artist. She felt “not good enough to be an artist.” Given to idolizing them, she thought claiming to be one would be a form of “secret pride,” exalting herself to the level of those she worshipped. After a summer spent with other artists, this doubt dissolved. She wrote, “I am gently disarmed. We are artists because we are ourselves.”

(Finland)

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Sandra Kantanen sweeps wet photographic prints with a paintbrush, leaving brushstrokes across each image. She uses aluminum plates finished with varnish, forming smooth, substantial works that hover between panting and photography.

Influenced by Chinese landscape painting and Impressionism, she photographs the sacred mountains of China, seeking ideal forms. These mountains have been recorded for thousands of years, but due to tourism and pollution, archetypal views prove elusive.

“I’m not Chinese,” she writes, “but I have been wondering where I got this overwhelming feeling of belonging in that culture. I somehow had to understand it. I felt this deep sorrow for something that was lost.”

(Canada)

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Deanna Pizzitelli feels at home in the analog world. After photographing using classical lighting, she makes salted paper prints. She wants her new work to look old, as if it has nearly faded away. Longing for a connection to the unknown, she is familiar with the feeling of wishing to be somewhere else. “My work,” she says, “is a call back to older times.”

(United States)

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Petra Collins started photographing her teenage sister’s circle of friends with disposable cameras. She now documents girls of her generation coming of age, with an eye to strength and non-conformity. Regardless of outward appearance, her subjects are made beautiful by her deeply honest portraits. Her work is unapologetic and sure of itself. “I think women always feel the need to ask for permission,” she says. “I never asked for permission, I just started taking photos.”

Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman are inspirations, but she spends more time with film than photographs. She is drawn to Wim Wenders’ narrative portraits of isolation and longing, deeply embedded in their settings. Collins’ portraits take place in intimate female environments: the pink tiled showers of a girls’ locker room, a young girl’s bedroom strung with Christmas lights. “I’ve never really had a real sense of ‘home,’” she says, “so looking at these places is my way of finding it.”

(Great Britain)

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Tacita Dean films buildings that are falling apart or are remnants of another time. She focuses on the movement of light on the floor, or small, insubstantial motion elsewhere. Her slow minimalism invokes anticipation and disappointment, reverberation and echo. In addition to films, she has made drawings, books, photographs and sculptures, all of which remain in the handmade, analogue world. While her work has been compared to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of aging industrial relics and W.G. Sebald’s novels joining past and present, illustrated by old snapshots, it is perhaps closer to Eugene Atet, who methodically photographed the streets of Paris, fearful of their imminent ruin at the hands of modernity. He had faith that a world in decline could only be preserved in one way: with a camera.

(Belgium)

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Ilse d’Hollander’s paintings have been compared to Bonnard and Matisse. Bonnard once wrote Matisse, “I enjoy defining the different types of landscape, ‘space’ landscape, intimate landscape, decorative landscape.” D’Hollander made many types of landscape paintings of rural Flanders, where she lived toward the end of her life. They vary in degrees of abstraction. At times objects on the horizon are delineated, at others they recede into the simplest forms: a swath of paint, a single brushstroke. There is a deep sense of solitude to her small, jewel-like paintings, many of which are small enough to hold in the palm of one hand

(India)

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“What I say to young people, when they want to study photography,” says Dayanita Singh, “is ‘Don’t bother with photography, Go study literature and then come to photography.’” With origins in photojournalism, Singh now calls herself “a bookmaker working with photography.” Her work blurs the line between photography, sculpture and the artist’s book. “The photographs ask to be read,” she says, “as if the book were a collection of stories.” Drawing on a vast photographic archive, she sequences and edits series of black and white images into ‘visual novels.’ Arranging photographs within vitrines, she also makes miniature museums, in which storylines change as images are moved and create new relationships. The museums have titles like Museum of Furniture, which only contains photographs of uninhabited rooms. She is currently creating a Museum of Smoke. The element of chance plays a large role in her work, as new juxtapositions of images create unexpected resonances. “I don’t want to tell you the whole story, because there is no complete story,” she says. “The story keeps changing.”

(United States)

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“Obviously, first I am involved in painting not the who and the how. I wonder if my pictures are more ‘lyrical’ (that loaded word!) because I’m a woman... Looking at my paintings as if they were painted by a woman is superficial, a side issue, like looking at Klines and saying they are bohemian. The making of serious painting is difficult and complicated for all serious painters. One must be oneself.”

-Helen Frankenthaler

(France)

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“All my work in the past 50 years,” she said, “all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it never lost its mystery, and it never lost its drama.”

-Louise Bourgeois

(Canada)

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“We say this rose is beautiful
and when this rose is destroyed then we have lost something
so that beauty has been lost
When the rose is destroyed we grieve
but really beauty is unattached”

-Agnes Martin

(United States)

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“We southerners, like Proust, have come to believe that the only true perfection is a lost perfection.”

-Sally Mann

(United States)

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Melissa Kretschmer’s sculptures have been compared to valentines, reliquaries and hermetically sealed vaults. She likens her process to improvisation, discarding initial models before creating the final work. She feels close to collage, pulling together pieces of wood, wax and glass (materials chosen for their mercurial qualities), and joining them to one another. Measuring fragments to a fraction of an inch, she fears her work gives the illusion of being precise, but stands firmly against precision in favor of accuracy. She says, “Accuracy is about the rightness of the whole entity rather than the fit of its individual parts.”

(Israel)

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Much of Keren Cytter’s inspiration comes from film directors like Larry Clark, David Lynch and Michelangelo Antonioni. “Her storytelling reminds you of the structure of a dream or the way in which memory functions,” writes curator Beatrix Ruf, “it creates uncertainty about connections, time and space; is self-referential; and blurs fact with fiction.” Her work is seen as imaginary, elusive and meandering, which she finds paradoxical as, she says, “I’m trying to do something so precise.”

(United States)

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“…that particular moment when they’re about to become what they’ll become. I like looking at people when they’re finding their way, living up to themselves.”

-Elizabeth Peyton

(United States)

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Attuned to the life of objects, Josephine Halvorson says they call out to her to be painted. She will finish a painting in a single sitting, but may spend years looking for a subject. Her practice centers on awareness, listening for what the object, once found, will reveal. “These are very active objects in the world,” she says.

She paints old tools, weathered buildings, outdated machines, always attentive to how they work, why they are needed, and what role they play in the world. She is interested in history, time and mechanics, all of which can be found sunk into the sorts of things that filled her parents’ Cape Cod blacksmith shop, where she spent countless hours as a child.

A self-proclaimed regional New England artist, she likens plein air painting to Thoreau’s idea of farming as interpretive labor. Influenced by Roman frescoes and Chinese ink paintings, she is also taken with Manet’s still lifes of flowers, made in his last months, when he could only work a few hours each day, seated, focused on what was directly before him. 

Her work has been compared to trompe l’oeil, which she likes because it refuses allegory. The objects themselves are enough.

(United States)

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Cynthia Daignault is interested in presence, memory, and vision. She often paints the natural world, or, more simply, light. Her influences include Beckett, Rothko and Morandi, whose essentialism, in its specificity, she admires.

After sitting before Monet’s “Water Lilies” at L’Orangerie for hours, studying each stroke of paint, every individual color, she came back up into the Jardin des Tuileries, and felt the world had changed. 

Whitman’s poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, moved her deeply. He imagines every person who will stand in his place and see what he sees, seeking companionship in solitude. “No matter how many hours I spend by myself in the studio,” she says, “I just don’t want to be in this alone.”

(Canada)

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Wanda Koop’s parents fled the Russian Revolution leaving behind all they had. “That’s why I’ve been more concerned with intangible things,” she says. She counts among her influences Wallace Stevens, whose close, plainspoken studies of the natural world are echoed in her own, and Glenn Gould, whose fascination with the Arctic, and its vast snowy plains, Koop shares, often painting winter moons and distant horizons. With their sparing use of pigment, her simple compositions have a sense of neutrality, opacity and flatness. If she had not become an artist, she says she would have been an astronomer or musician. Her interest in the elemental is made clear in her work.

(United States)

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Sarah McKenzie paints architecture in a state of transformation: coming into being, or a starting to decay. Her mother is a land use planner, so she has long been familiar with the sheet glass, electrical wires and creased tarps she paints. For several years she has painted windows: empty views through soulless hotel windows, or broken windows of abandoned buildings. She says she finds incomplete structures the most beautiful, as they convey “a sense of absence and longing.”

(Israel)

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Orit Raff is influenced by minimalism as well as the Northern Romantic tradition. She is especially drawn to the ice-covered landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Raff likes to photograph empty rooms, absence and the lingering remains of presence. She hopes to focus our eyes on what is unseen or passed over lightly. “By photographing these marginal details; stains, traces, dust, dirt, I bring them to the center of vision, allowing them to exist and prevail,” she says, in an attempt to foreground “the abjectness of the otherwise invisible.”

(United States)

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After her teenaged sister committed suicide, Nan Goldin moved to New York at fourteen, alone. “I am always searching for a family,” she has said. Influenced by Larry Clark and Diane Arbus, she gravitated toward those on the outskirts of society, but insists they never saw themselves as peripheral. “We were the world,” she says. 

Shot against the backdrop of a downtown New York nostalgic for Warhol-era counterculture, her work has been described as a combination of “low-rent glamour, squalor and beauty,” and as “invasive yet oddly solitary.” She denies that all her portraits are self-portraits, but boundless longing pervades each one. Phyllis Reid writes, “Goldin has a gift for connection that is a product of her bottomless desire for it.”

(Germany)

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Influenced by Robert Irwin, Robert Ryman and John Cage (especially his use of silence) Uta Barth’s photographs resemble minimalist painting, “engaging the ephemeral, the ambient, and the subliminal,” as she says. Her work implies peripheral vision, showing not obvious elements of a place, but details we come to know after living somewhere a long time. In one series she photographed light as it fell through a line of windows and across a couch in her own home, pale gold rectangles lingering on the wall, haunting empty space.

In another series she pays homage to an unexpected forebear: Vermeer. Reproductions of his work hung in her childhood home. Like Vermeer, Barth is drawn to quiet, domestic scenes, and the quality of light filtering through windows. Noting that the etymology of photograph is “writing with light,” she tries to capture elusive, unnoticed moments. Her compositions are like poems whose lines are made of light: fragile, ethereal, on the verge of vanishing.

Switzerland

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Corinne Vionnet layers hundreds of similar photographs of the same landmark to give an impression of a place we all know. She chooses locations based on travel brochures and tourism statistics, then culls anonymous snapshots from the Internet. Influenced by the mists of Monet and Turner, as well as early etchings of monuments, she hopes to create a portrait of collective memory.

(United States)

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After growing up “surrounded by cliché representations of [her] own experiences,” Lilly McElroy seeks authenticity and the personal. Unafraid to let her work be literal or clumsy, she purposely risks failure so her photographs will feel more natural and resist artifice. This sense of longing bleeds over into the work itself. She says, “I’m interested in talking about how human the desire for connection is.”

(United States)

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Jessica Todd Harper spent her childhood on museum floors, copying John Singer Sargent and Vermeer paintings in crayon, and later watercolors. As an art history major in college, she encountered Memling and Durer, whose paintings seemed to be about almost nothing, the everyday, the commonplace, “but whose charged, quiet, domestic scenes haunted [her] afterwards.” She has been compared to Tina Barney and Sally Mann. The work of all three invites us into private worlds whose unguarded moments reveal interior life.

(Brazil)

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Mona Kuhn’s first studies in art were charcoal drawings, and her photographs retain a loose, freehand feel, often forming meditations on light and shadow. Influenced by the frank intimacy of Nan Goldin, she uncovers vulnerability with a tenderness that mutes its dangers.

Her most recent series was photographed in the desert during magic hour, the golden moments around sunrise and sunset. “It is not just the lighting,” she says. “I think we feel different during those moments, as if emotions could stand still for a few minutes.” 

Desert light intrigues her. She studies its motion and its emotional resonance. “People get tired of the heat, you start feeling the weight of light, it becomes heavy,” she says. She is drawn to the solitude of the desert, which, she says, “gives you a sense of freedom and loneliness at once.”

(Great Britain)

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Sarah Jones likes to photograph shades of blue, which, in the Renaissance, represented the sublime or distance. From Beckett she learned to strip away all that is not essential. From Rothko she learned to limit her palette and settle on a single formal structure. She says, “I was remembering, as a child, seeing how long I could hold my breath for, and in a sense that’s both to freeze the world and also perhaps to freeze yourself within the world. I think that’s what I do with my photographs.”

(Canada)

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Moyra Davey’s current show’s title, Ornament and Rebuke, comes from a gravestone inscription in a London churchyard she photographed. The deceased was “confessedly the ornament and at the same time the tacit reproach of a wicked age.” Davey herself is a rebuke to our age. On a newspaper clipping reading, “I think the clever people are those who do” she has written, “as little as possible.” Faced with the frenetic pace of this century, Davey slows down time, meditating on single moments, turning them over in her mind, drawing out their melancholy mystery. 

In a suite of photographs of a Parisian cemetery, a blurred woman crosses an allée of ghostly trees. We glimpse her, but never really see her, as if she were a phantom or memory. Fragmentary images hint at a momentous yet elusive encounter in this foreign cemetery. Nothing about it is certain, as in reminiscence or dreams. If Moyra Davey’s work is an ornament, it is like tinsel, a brilliant wisp of paper reflecting and hinting at what is precious.

(Lebanon)

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War broke out in her native Lebanon while Mona Hatoum was visiting London in her early twenties. She remained there in exile for the rest of her student years. As a result, her work deals with themes of alienation, displacement, belonging and collective memory.

(Germany)

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Karin Apollonia Müller starts with photographs taken from a space telescope hundreds of miles above the earth. She molds them into a romantic globe, where geography is altered, balanced and harmonized. Inspired by a 17th century drawing of the imaginary sunken city of Atlantis, her collaged continents look drowned or moonlit. Clusters of city lights glowing across stretches of darkness remind her of “fireflies seeking a mate against the blackness of night.”

(United States)

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Penelope Umbrico chose photographs of mountains by iconic photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, re-photographed them with her iPhone, then used widely available filters to transform the images into an ice-cream colored game board. "For me those mountains are distant, mythical and, in a way, not real," she says. "The camera apps further this sense of the unreal." There is an element of refusal in this work, and a certain ambivalence about the idea of originality. But her palette and formal construction leave no doubt about the deliberate nature of her artistic practice, and her aesthetic is well defined: a feeling of profusion, of desire, of confectionary excess emanates from her work. There is so much pleasure in it. Mountains are formidable, but by painting them fairy-tale colors, she softens them. By using the iPhone camera and filters we all have in our pockets to re-photograph the likes of Adams and Weston, she brings revered masters closer to us. She says, "I wanted the idea of remoteness to be in the act of looking and capturing, as well, to talk about the idea of distance this way."

(Japan)

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Attempting to describe Rinko Kawauchi's evanescent photographs, people often use words like curiosity and wonder. Kawauchi says she wants you to "feel something is going to happen," but not be sure quite what. In her pale, cool palette, she presents abstract moments, at times just a wash of faint, shimmering colors: a diamond sparkling, the view through a kaleidoscope, cherry blossoms filtering sunlight. She is celebrated for teasing the sublime out of the mundane, which she does through mindful contemplation of elemental patterns in the natural world. Her compositional style is so assured that it seems not the culmination of an aesthetic evolution, but an instant of serendipity.

(Brazil)

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Fernanda Gomes' minimalist sculptures harken back to the matchbox structures of earlier female Brazilian sculptors from the Neo-concretist movement. She creates environments imbued with balance and grace out of what might ordinarily be discarded: bits of wood, tissue paper, crumpled translucent paper, linen thread, lone sticks of bamboo. All her works are untitled, and consist of found objects in natural or slightly altered states, highlighting an ambivalence between organic material and perfected artwork. Her efforts have been called alchemy. Gomes starts with empty space, into which she places objects both disposable and precious, to which she sometimes adds small strokes of white paint. A dialogue is created between her fragile, nearly invisible elements in their vast white cloisters: A mobile made of wire and feathers, a single gold sequin on a brittle white surface. Her work has been likened to the poems of Charles Simic, especially the close of "The White Room." Gods disguising themselves As black hairpins? A hand-mirror? A comb with a tooth missing? No! That wasn't it. Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light

(Sweden)

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Mamma Andersson was raised in rural Sweden, spending short summers in the forests and long winters indoors studying art books. Her influences include films, theater sets, period interiors, and painters like Hopper, Bonnard, and Manet. Her stark, deserted vignettes have been compared to Harold Pinter's work, and she was asked to create a picture to accompany his Nobel Prize certificate. "My style follows a very Nordic painting tradition: landscapes, interiors, relationships, and dramas," she says. She describes her work as consisting of "frozen moments," and "life in a distilled form."