Loie Hollowell @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - "Space Between, A survey of ten years" Exhibition

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, 

A survey of ten years

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield 

January 21 - August 11, 2024

LOIE HOLLOWELL

Point of Entry (blue green mounds over yellow sky), 2017 

Courtesy of Carolina Zapf & John Josephson

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents LOIE HOLLOWELL’s first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast, which includes paintings and works on paper made over a decade, the debut of new pastel drawings and paintings that incorporate life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies, as well as never before exhibited works on paper from the artist’s archive.

Space Between tracks the development of Loie Hollowell’s visual language over ten years; a vocabulary that bridges abstraction with figuration, autobiography with art history, and biology with emotion. Orbiting two centuries of pioneering women artists that span generations and movements from Abstraction to Surrealism to 1960s Light and Space art, including Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Judy Chicago, Loie Hollowell also cites Neo-Tantric painting as an important influence. Hollowell’s approach always begins with her own body as a guide to appraise seismic issues from sexual freedom to feminism, and reproductive rights and motherhood.

This survey’s focus considers time as material and theme. Loie Hollowell turns the body into a metaphorical clock, documenting extreme intervals of change through dramatic chiaroscuro, saturated color, and charged light. Her labor-intensive process begins with a pastel drawing. She makes notes in the margins indicating how to translate her vision into painting. Her sentient compositions are then built with geometric and biomorphic forms, evocative of bellies, breasts, vulva, and buttocks that abstract the physical and emotional transformations she experienced throughout conception, birth, and postpartum with her two children. 

Her paintings are endowed with dimensional relief, achieved by adhering CNC-milled high-density foam or cast-resin appendages to the surfaces to impersonate fleshy bulges and curves. These protrusions, which vary in depth, soften the works’ rigid two-dimensionality, and evade the line between painting and sculpture to confront the viewer with visceral beauty. She uses a palette that glows, throbs, and blazes, a luminescent progression of reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens, pinks, and purples, that vaunt a mercurial tempo from tender to explosive. Applying a rigorous symmetry in reference to the human body, she choreographs the energies and emotions that come from the mental and physical with an emphasis on the birthing body; the epicenter of the universe, where the heavens connect with the earth.

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first museum monograph, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., featuring an essay by the curator Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

LOIE HOLLOWELL was born in 1983 and raised in Woodland, California. She currently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA at University of California Santa Barbara in 2005 and an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide including Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis; Pace Gallery; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Feuer/Mesler, New York; White Cube Gallery, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Victoria Miro, London; and Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Her work is in public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; ICA, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Stedjelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM 

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877 

www.thealdrich.org

Hangama Amiri @ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City - "A Homage to Home" Exhibition

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

January 25 – August 11, 2024

Hangama Amiri (Afghan-Canadian, born 1989) 

Departure, 2022 

Muslin, cotton, polyester, clear vinyl, iridescent paper, 

faux leather, chiffon, and found fabric, 68 ½ x 85 inches. 

Courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome. 

© Hangama Amiri. Photo: Jason Mandella.

Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and diasporic experience. Hangama Amiri fled Kabul with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Hangama Amiri was a teenager. Large-scaled with frayed edges, Hangama Amiri’s textile works are made from layering fabrics, piecing and sewing them together, so the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Hangama Amiri’s work is centered on the lives of women. She often builds interiors that capture her protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces and amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world. 

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, chief curator, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where it debuted in February 2023.

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski @ The Aldrich, Ridgefield - Portal Pieces

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski 

Portal Pieces

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

January 6 - May 29, 2022

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI

Graduation Day, 2021

Courtesy of the artist

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is the third installment of Aldrich Projects, a single artist series that features a singular work or a focused body of work by an artist every four months on the Museum’s campus. Sited in the Leir Atrium, AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI presents two large-scale works on paper, Graduation Day, 2021, and The Guardians, 2015. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s practice is informed by her Puerto Rican American heritage and a peripatetic upbringing spent crisscrossing the US. Probing motifs of intersectionality, mythmaking, and queerness, she says her visual worldbuilding exploits the “spaces in-between categories” and honors “the trouble and pleasure [sited] there.”

Her expansive body of work spans drawings, video, sculpture, performance, and installation. Using fabled symbolism, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s pantheon of black and brown femme goddesses, heroines, and crusaders adventure across time and space using magical powers to protect and prevail. Her inspirations span art history, popular culture, and higher realms, from comics, ancient cuneiform, Caribbean Surrealism, occult, and alchemical diagrams. 

Graduation Day is a monumental drawing and collage on paper that depicts an erupting rainbow inferno. Inside a triangular-shaped grotto, a figure levitates above a shadowy portal. Two spirit beings, one an iridescent blue and the other a fluorescent brown, hover over the reposing body. They each clutch the end of a wishbone, a symbol of untapped potential. A pink triangle blazes within the scene, snapping the wishbone and releasing a purple flame that burns and shimmers with beaming optimism.

The Guardians is a large gouache and tea drawing on paper. It portrays a pair of protectors brandishing bone swords in the company of a dark horse. Within a field of chamomile, they stand guard. Each is heavily adorned and tattooed with symbols of strength, abundance, nourishment, and passage.

These two works on paper are part of an ongoing mythology that spotlight marginalized histories and femme power. Invigorated by lived and imagined experience, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s utopian storylines speak to struggle, redemption, repair, and reinvention. 

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI was born in 1985 in Bordeaux, France. She earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2014. She is a current recipient of the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and was a 2019 Kindle Project Makers Muse Award recipient. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Cue Art Foundation, MoCADA, SOMArts, New York University, Luce Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others. Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski will be featured in the Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, opening in June 2022. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is curated by Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

thealdrich.org

Frank Stella @ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield - Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

Frank Stella's Stars, A Survey

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Through May 9, 2021

Spanning more than sixty years, Frank Stella’s studio practice has pushed abstraction to the limits, investigating every category from painting and printmaking to sculpture and public art. Among the myriad of forms found in Stella’s work, one element continuously reappears, a motif that is simultaneously abstract and figurative: the star. Immediately identifiable, the star stands out amidst the tangle of abstract, invented forms the artist has explored over his long career. Under the spotlight for the first time, this exhibition surveys Frank Stella’s use of the star, ranging from two-dimensional works of the 1960s to its most recent incarnation in sculptures, wall reliefs, and painted objects from the 2010s.

Frank Stella’s use of the star form emerged during his first decade in New York as he was exhibiting his groundbreaking striped and shaped paintings. It then vanished and resurfaced many decades later at a moment when he committed himself to three-dimensional abstraction. Today, the star is the lead in scores of works from small objects to towering sculptures. Scaled to the table or the open air, Frank Stella’s star works transport us—we imagine how disparate elements shift, how parts are assembled, how paint is applied. The works parade an outsized material resourcefulness that collapses analogue and twenty-first century fabrication techniques: RPT (rapid prototype technology) plastics, teak, aluminum, stainless steel, birch plywood, fiberglass, carbon fiber, and more. With their automotive neon hues, shimmering and natural finishes, the stars, big and small, flex and project a spatial dynamism that intimates a potential maneuverability—as if they were built to perform.

At The Aldrich, Frank Stella’s star works are on view outdoors throughout the Museum’s grounds and inside the galleries. Outside, large-scale sculptures are sited from Ridgefield’s historic Main Street, the Museum’s semi-enclosed interior courtyard, and two-acre Sculpture Garden. Inside, the exhibition occupy the entire ground floor including the Museum’s Project Space where the largest sculpture in the exhibition, Fat 12 Point Carbon Fiber Star (2016), challenges the room’s perimeter with its twelve puffed up rays stretching twenty-one feet in all directions. The star is characterized in this survey as a breakthrough element. From a simple, planar shape to an ornamented spatial object, its manifestation reveals stylistic continuity amidst decisive variation.

The Museum’s founder Larry Aldrich showed early interest in Frank Stella’s work and exhibited Tetuan (1963) one year after he founded The Aldrich. Additionally, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, established in 1959, supported the Museum of Modern Art in purchasing Stella’s painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II—the first work by the artist to enter their collection. Since the Museum’s founding in 1964, Frank Stella’s work has been included in fifteen group exhibitions.

Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA) has created an exceptional body of work over his six-decade career. Spanning painting, sculpture, and printmaking, his work is held in more than fifty public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Frank Stella currently lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color 200-page hardbound catalogue, featuring essays by the exhibition’s curators Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart.

FRANK STELLA'S STARS, A SURVEY

200 Pages, fully-illustrated

Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-941366-29-5

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 

and Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Essays by Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart 

Design: Gretchen Kraus

Production Coordinator: Caitlin Monachino

Copy Editor: Mary Cason

Curated by Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director, and Amy Smith-Stewart, Senior Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

www.aldrichart.org