News-2025

Solo Exhibition in New York, March 15 to April 19

7 March, 2025

Medrie MacPhee will be exhibiting her work in two upcoming solo exhibitions. The Repair will be on view at Tibor de Nagy in New York from March 15-April 19, 2025. She will also exhibit The Edge of the Alphabet in Toronto at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, from 26-May 24, 2025.

The Repair at Tibor de Nagy is the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist. For the occasion, the art historian Nancy Princenthal wrote the following essay on MacPhee’s work.

Helpfully providing some coordinates for her recent paintings, Medrie MacPhee directed my attention to a few sculptors, including Phyllida Barlow. In particular, she cited the car trips Barlow remembered taking with her father through London just after World War II, when the domestic interiors of half-bombed buildings remained exposed. It made me think also of London-born Judy Pfaff’s similar experience of London after the blitz. Both women became poets of the fragmentary. MacPhee herself, in earlier collages and drawings, took architecture and demolition as primary references, depicting structures blasted open and flattened, both ravaged and ordered.

The paintings MacPhee now assembles from used clothes are like floor plans of deconstructed bodies. Or, like maps of the globe, the world cut and flattened. But volume resists; it wants to expand, to pucker. In MacPhee’s current work, shapes and colors jostle, elbowing each other. Ripped seams are soldered with paint and thereby heightened, like scars. Buttons and zippers are rendered useless, but prominent. MacPhee’s paintings can evoke abbreviated contour drawings, as in A Path of No Return. Or, strongly suggest blueprints (Circulation of Desire, For the Record). There is both violence and repair in the work. And, on occasion, the calm of a settled landscape.

In the UK, and in Canada, where MacPhee grew up, billboards and walls on which ads and posters are plastered, often one on top of the other, are called hoardings. The Affichistes of postwar Paris made away with these palimpsests, sometimes ripping them from round kiosks as well, and then tearing them back to reveal layers hidden beneath; some were already torn. Among artists on her mind, MacPhee names the last century’s two hotly competitive Louises. She notes that Nevelson stalked her neighborhood while it was being demolished in the 1950s, scavenging wood to fashion her baleful storage units. Bourgeois, equally unwilling to give up her past, preserved the silks and linens of her trousseau and, toward the end of her long life, hung them on spindly mobiles; she also patched together fearsome cloth figures from salvaged textile remnants. Both artists transformed their pasts—their hoardings—into art. MacPhee’s paintings are steeped in material history, too, though it is less self-referential. Clothes have memories of their own.

Along with unrelinquished memory, there is discord in MacPhee’s work—as, for instance, in the tumbling tank tops and tight, sassy red pants of Yes!. MacPhee writes of “finding a new use for the discards and cheap clothes that are pawed over in a bin.” The novelist E.L. Doctorow once described, in a public talk, women of his mother’s age bargain hunting at S. Klein on the Square and furiously sifting through such bins, the clothes “fountaining” as they searched—an indelible image. The rag trade remains a furious business, and a business of immigrants and immigration, with “second-hand” clothing circulating from country to country, bearing progressively cryptic messages (sometimes literally, in the form T-shirts bearing text): the code of thrift.

That polyglot tongue of recycled textiles informs MacPhee’s work. Its language, she says, has a rebellious lyricism that borrows its bleak but plainspoken humor from Samuel Beckett. Calling her undertaking “an absurd task,” she also describes it as one that is inescapably human. “Get the clothing, unpick it, splay it out, gesso over it many times, paint something on top that may or may not adhere to the structure underneath. A mirroring,” she adds, “of the task of living.”

– Nancy Princenthal, 2025

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s and Hannah Wilke, and her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among many others. A longtime Contributing Editor (and former Senior Editor) at Art in America, she has also written for the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Bomb, Apollo and elsewhere.

(Photo credit: John Berens | Medrie MacPhee, For the Record, 2023. Oil and mixed media on canvas. 64 x 84 inches)


Solo Exhibition in Toronto April 26-May 24

7 March, 2025

Medrie MacPhee will be exhibiting her work in two upcoming solo exhibitions. The Edge of the Alphabet will be on view at Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto from April 26-May 24, 2025. She will also exhibit The Repair at Tibor de Nagy in New York, March 15-April 19, 2025.

The Edge of the Alphabet, Medrie MacPhee’s latest series, continues her intuitive approach of collaging clothing onto canvas or panel and then painting on top. The exhibition presents a uniform scale of 30 x 24 inch panels – a smaller format than MacPhee has previously worked on in this medium. The paintings are also more textural than ever before. In addition to the occasional seam, button, or zipper, she uses pumice-infused paint to enhance the work’s sculptural qualities. While the paintings at first read as abstractions, the titles reveal their unique inspirations from everyday life as in ‘Sleeping, Dreaming’ and ‘A Particle and a Wave.’ While her use of clothing inherently references the body, MacPhee also uses the seams and various textures to give each painting its own semiotic meaning, like that of a visual haiku. Throughout her distinguished career, MacPhee has been fascinated in words as complex objects, as forms that hold within them weight, structure, memory, emotion, and association. (source: Nicholas Metivier Gallery Instagram)

Click here for a preview of the works.

(Photo credit: John Berens | Medrie MacPhee, A Particle and a Wave, 2024. Oil and mixed media on panel. 30 x 24 in.)


Medrie MacPhee included in Anonymous Was A Woman

7 March, 2025

Medrie MacPhee is included in this comprehensive account of remarkable artwork and accomplishments by 251 contemporary women recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman award, published by The University of Chicago Press.

Edited by Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenovic Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years celebrates the transformative impact of women artists on contemporary art since the founding of the titular grant. In addition to new essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Alexandra Schwartz, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Jenni Sorkin, and Gaby Collins-Fernandez, the book offers a biographical description with selected artworks of each artist who received the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) award from its founding in 1996 through 2020, a period in which the accomplishments of women have thoroughly transformed contemporary art.

In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the AWAW award, this landmark publication surveys each of the recipient’s careers and offers a wealth of previously untold histories. Anonymous Was A Woman also includes contributions by coeditors Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenovic, along with commentaries by other women scholars and a roundtable discussion featuring founder Susan Unterberg.

(source: The University of Chicago Press Website, 2025)