Elizabeth Winton
Elizabeth Winton Curated by Douglas Dunn January 27 - March 12, 2011
Board of Directors
CUE FELLOWS
Gregory Amenoff
Gregory Amenoff
Theodore S. Berger
Polly Apfelbaum
Sanford Biggers
Theodore S. Berger, Chair
Patricia Caesar
Ian Cooper
Thomas G. Devine
William Corbett
Thomas K.Y. Hsu
Eleanor Heartney
Vivian Kuan
Deborah Kass
Corina Larkin
Corina Larkin
Jan Rothschild
Jonathan Lethem
Brian D. Starer
Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow
curatorial
Carolyn Somers
Advisory Council
Lilly Wei
Gregory Amenoff Bill Berkson
Staff
William Corbett
Executive Director Jeremy Adams
Michelle Grabner Jonathan Lethem
Development Director Marni Corbett
Lari Pittman Thomas Roma
Programs Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese
Marjorie Welish
Programs Coordinator Ryan Thomas Gallery Assistant Jessica Gildea
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CUE Art Foundation is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit forum for contemporary art and cultural exchange that provides opportunities and resources for underrecognized artists. We value the astonishing diversity of creativity that artists provide and the importance of their activity in the social context of the city. CUE provides artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives. Our programs include exhibitions, publications, professional development seminars, educational outreach, symposia, readings and performances. Since 2002, we have operated from our 4,500 square foot storefront venue in the heart of New York’s Chelsea Arts District. CUE exhibiting artists are chosen by their peers who are themselves selected by a rotating advisory council from across the country. This pluralistic process ensures that CUE consistently offers diverse viewpoints from multiple disciplines of artistic practice. Simply put, we give artists their CUE to take center stage in the challenging world of art.
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Artist: Elizabeth Winton
I build rather than render space in my paintings. I construct with paper and pigment; framing, folding, tearing, peeling off, and laying materials on top. I add forms to emphasize a bluntness of object or body, and simultaneously reach for a larger sense of air or expanse. Edges restrict and contain, but also interact, suggesting continuation, movement and sensation. My recent paintings include pieces from my prints created as collagraphs. I begin a collagraph by painting on board with clear acrylic mediums, forming an image whose later visibility is determined by the degree to which its surface collects or repels ink. The malleability and receptivity of paper to mark under the extreme physical pressure of the press allows me new access to dualities inherent to my work such as touch and remove, distance and immediacy. Rather than work towards polish, I am focused on individual states of formation and continued mutation. As the paper’s delicate surface merges with wood and other mediums beneath, I find new range. I leave paper fragments partially adhered to my paintings, reflecting a natural state of exploration, allowing for real movement, highlighting the material’s fragility, and furthering implications of impermanence and change.
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Biography:
Elizabeth Winton is a Brooklyn-based visual artist working primarily in painting, collage and printmaking. She received her BA with a focus in fine art from Connecticut College in 1991. During this period and continuing after graduation she studied independently in New York, working as an artist’s assistant to Elizabeth Murray and Mimi Gross. Though a resident of New York City since 1991, she has also sought out concentrated periods for working in more quiet rural environments. This includes residencies in Johnson, VT and retreats in Provincetown, MA and East Hampton, NY. Winton has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including shows at Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY; Margaret Bodell Gallery, New York, NY; the Ruby Green Contemporary Art Center in Nashville, TN; and the Guadalupe Cultural Center, San Antonio, TX. Her most recent two-person show Stir, Draw, Pitch: New Abstractions was at the Kolok Gallery in North Adams, MA in September, 2007. Winton’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation marks her first solo show in New York City.
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Curator: Douglas Dunn
She’s restless. She dances in front of her works as if to advance them. If she could throw herself onto the canvas, her body’s metamorphosed smithereens arranging themselves to build the image, she would do so. Once there, she could further its evolution, delving from no distance. An urge to prove prowess by means of a polished, finished sense of painterly beauty is juxtaposed to, and finally defied by, a contradictory impulse toward wildness, an extravagant profusion charged by a constantly streaming, multi-layered intuition. At a first studio visit, she shows completed paintings of various sizes. They are complex, but a consistency of luscious texture and color keeps them readable in whole as well as in parts. There are no shapes, but instead small regions that pull this way and that, drawing the eye here and there on a map of unexplored territories eminently worthy of visit. The paint itself and its sensuous rhythms are in themselves attractive, as if to compete with the idea of wholeness of picture. At first the works seem two-dimensional, surfaces only. But as time continues, depth appears, and the investigation begins anew. The map animates. A minute ago it was possibly representing alien worlds. Now the chart has become those worlds; now there is no end to the pleasure of entering and wandering about within them. A second visit a few months later provides a shock, a break as defiant as that between High Renaissance and Baroque. The earlier works take on the aura of classics as the more recent ones apocalyptically react to them. Has she indeed thrown herself bodily onto and into the canvas? She pulls out to show an equal number of paintings and prints. The latter have become a fulcrum, she says, leverage propelling her closer to images less about what paint can do, more about what it can say. In several of the print media, she explains, the outcome is not readily predictable. This uncertainty throws her pleasingly off her previous beauty-bound game. Other matters of accident have also come alive. Having taped images to the wall, she becomes interested in the tape as part of the image, leaving it on, peeling it off, pulling it half off. The prints also not asking for a painting’s obviousness of outline, she has begun to seize the opportunity to “open up the edges.” The vagaries of printmaking having triggered release from a sobriety necessary to the earlier elegance, new worlds appear. A wild cacophony? A myriad mish-mash? Humor? At first glance, a disturbing chaos, for sure. But, strangely, and powerfully, a new unity abides. Her commentary provides clues as to how and why. She talks of what “holds” or not, what “pops” or not, what “balances” or not. Myriad shapes populate these worlds, but none is representational. They interact, and make for depth, but without creating a “scene.” Friends seeing the imagery bursting inward and outward ask: why not move to sculpture? The answer is obvious: because 6
her current interest is this very tension between intricate three-dimensionality and a two-dimensional surface. Her excitement, showing willy-nilly through a fundamental modesty, the stimulation of entrance into a newfound arena of exploration and exigency, is tangible.
Biography:
Douglas Dunn is Artistic Director of Douglas Dunn & Dancers/Rio Grande Union Inc. Since 1971 he has been making and presenting dances in New York City and elsewhere. He also teaches Open Structures at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education & Human Development and presents Salon events at his studio in Manhattan. For more information, please visit: www.DouglasDunnDance.com
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Elizabeth Winton
ANKA 2, 2010 Mixed media on panel, 30" x 20" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Cast 7, 2010 Mixed media on canvas, 58" x 80" Photograph Courtesy of John F. Morgan
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Stir [detail above], 2010 Mixed media on canvas, 64" x 56" Photograph Courtesy of John F. Morgan
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Pitch/Blue, 2010 Mixed media on panel, 16" x 12" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Untitled 3, 2010 Mixed media on canvas, 38" x 40" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Untitled 2, 2010 Mixed media on canvas, 18" x 18"
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Stir/Blue, 2010 Mixed media on panel, 24" x 18" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Untitled 1, 2010 Unique print (collagraph, mixed media), 30" x 22" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Morgan 3, 2010 Unique print (collagraph, mixed media), 30" x 22" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong
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Pitch 3 [detail], 2010 Mixed media on canvas, 47" x 39" Photograph Courtesy of John F. Morgan
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States of Formation and Change: Elizabeth Winton’s Prints and Paintings By Greg Lindquist
This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit www.aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Elizabeth Baker and Lilly Wei are AICA's Coordinators for this program this season.
Elizabeth Winton’s latest works employ a hybrid of techniques, combining printmaking, collage and painting. Composed from splinters of paper and paint, her most recent “paintings” have roots in the collagraphic prints she made from 2008 to 2010. Prior to this development, Winton’s paintings were characterized by dense accumulations of wobbly hatchings and swaths of paint, and a naturalistic landscape palette, recalling the spirit of Abstract Expressionism on an intimate scale. Winton, who has lived in New York since completing her B. A. at Connecticut College in 1991, rediscovered monotyping at the Lower East Side Printshop in 2007. She had experimented with it on occasion for fifteen years. “I intuitively felt it would help focus my ideas quicker,” she recalled. A year later, she learned the collagraphic process, a related technique in which she began to incorporate shards of rice paper as a masking element. The collagraph’s defining characteristic is its use of texture to print. Using a collaged surface as the image 21
States of Formation and Change: Elizabeth Winton’s Prints and Paintings
plate, or “matrix,” a collagraph can be inked for both intaglio and relief printing. Unlike monotypes, collagraphs are made with a fixed matrix, so the same image can be printed many times in different ways. Winton works with book-binding board and uses a range of glossy and matte acrylic mediums to mask parts of the plate; she also uses rice paper for that purpose. Because the rice paper is thin, ink often bleeds through. She then collages passages of dried acrylic paint scraped from her palette into the prints. A collagraph such as Untitled 1 (2010) achieves an openness of form and mark making by loose layering and the exposure of raw paper. She has translated this airiness to her recent paintings by masking acrylic paint with rice paper or mylar. Often, Winton removes this paper mask. When she does not, as in Untitled 2 (2010), the partially adhered paper becomes an evocative residue of her technique, and a pictorial element in its own right. Having recently acquired a printing press, Winton now maintains both her printmaking and painting practices in her Bushwick studio, a former warehouse. Winton grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, experiencing the crafts and outsider art of the South. She says that she has always felt surrounded by people making things, but didn’t learn any art history until college, when she was first exposed to Abstract Expressionism. The newest paintings that Winton showed me in her studio have loosely collaged elements, which, as in her collagraphs, often extend beyond the picture plane. In these works, the mottled rice paper swells outward from the canvas’s surface or extends over its edges, recalling the eccentric shaped canvases of Elizabeth Murray, in whose studio Winton interned as an undergraduate from 1989 - 1990. These flowing forms may bring to mind as well the work of Mimi Gross, for whom Winton also interned while she was in college. Winton recalls, “She had all this intensely colored, dyed silk hanging on clothes lines throughout the studio. These were either to be used for dance costumes, sets or sculpture. But it was this airy floating color in space. I loved it.” By bringing collage into a sculptural space around the canvas, Winton’s current paintings also suggest a three-dimensional theatricality. Winton’s distinctive image-making method also includes the traditional collage process of papier collé (French for “pasted paper”), in which an artist pastes pieces of flat material into a painting much the same way as in a collage. But Winton’s pasted pieces do not take the shape of objects, as did the pasted-on elements in the work of Cubist painter Georges Braque. Inspired by Pablo 22
Picasso’s collages, Braque first used the papier collé technique in his painting, Fruit Dish and Glass (1912). Winton’s removal of elements from her paintings can be considered a form of décollage (which translates roughly as “to take off” or “to become unstuck,” and involves cutting and scraping away parts of images), a technique that is, in a sense, the opposite of collage. The French affichistes (“poster designers”) of the 1950s are another close link to Winton’s process. Raymond Hains’ collages, made from torn subway posters, utilize a similar method of removal, rearrangement and re-adhering of various papers. In a work such as Pitch 3 (2010), Winton’s bold, playful use of jagged form and primary color evokes a rough take on Murray’s Surrealist-influenced Pop vocabulary of cartoonish shapes. The tearing in Winton’s collage-paintings is implicitly violent, yet executed in a delicate manner much like her choice of colors, including a range of grays and neutrals. Unlike her contemporaries working in mixed media-painting hybrids such as Mark Bradford and Wangechi Mutu, Winton brings no apparent narrative content—political, social, economic, or cultural—to her work, impelled only by an intuitive approach to formal concerns and process-driven inquiry. Creating her own vocabulary and pictorial world, Winton is reluctant to title her work, restricting names to those things close to her: “Morgan” refers to the street on which her studio is located, “ANKA” is simply a made-up sound. Other titles are made by actions associated with the paintings, such as “stir” or “pitch”. At the age of 17, Winton lived with artist friends of her grandparents in Zapopan, Mexico. These friends ran a cultural center graced by José Clemente Orozco’s social realist murals, which became the subject of a high school independent study project. Winton’s interest in Orozco, who was known for championing political causes such as the rights of peasants and workers, is interesting because she has removed narrative (or overt political content, for that matter) in her work. In Winton’s statement, she discusses a focus on the “individual states of formation and continued mutation” in her paintings. This description calls to mind a molecular, cellular or otherwise organism-like painting process, one that requires intuitive, empirical decision-making, rather than a priori thought. Chameleon-like in their changeable formation, her abstractions offer the pleasures of visual richness and technical complexity.
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The writer, Greg Lindquist is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist. He contributes regularly to ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail and Beautiful/ Decay and is a Contributing Editor at artcritical.com. He also contributed an essay to the monograph Ryan McGinness Works, published by Rizzoli International. As an artist, Lindquist has been written about in ARTnews, Art in America, Sculpture, Frieze, NY Press, The New York Sun and The New York Observer. He attended the ArtOMI international residency and received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2009. In 2010, Lindquist participated in the exhibition Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back, organized by the Laura Palmer Foundation in the Ministry of Transportation building in Tbilisi, Georgia.
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The mentor, Nancy Princenthal , is a New York-based critic and former Senior Editor of Art in America, for which she continues to write regularly; she has contributed to many other publications as well, including Art News, Artforum, Parkett, the Village Voice, and The New York Times. Princenthal has recently published a monograph on Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and her essays appear in books and exhibition catalogues on the work of Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold, Alfredo Jaar, Rona Pondick, and Petah Coyne, among others. She has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University; and RISD, and is currently on the faculties of New York University and the School of Visual Arts.
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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.
Major program support is provided by: Accademia Charitable Foundation Inc. The Viking Foundation AG Foundation The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. The Greenwall Foundation The Greenwich Collection Inc. Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation The Joan Mitchell Foundation The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts (a State agency) William Talbot Hillman Foundation The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust The Koret Foundation The Hyde and Watson Foundation
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media sponsor:
Cover Image: Stir/Blue [detail], 2010 Mixed media on panel, 24" x 18" Photograph Courtesy of Jean Vong All artwork Š Elizabeth Winton
CUE Art Foundation 511 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 212-206-3583 f 212-206-0321 cueartfoundation.org
ISBN: 978-0-9843122-7-6 Catalog design: elizabeth ellis Printed by mar+x myles inc. using 100% wind-generated power
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2010-11
CUE Art Foundation 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 212-206-3583 f 212-206-0321 cueartfoundation.org