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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)


Premier solo show in Los Angeles at Vielmetter LA

10 June, 2024

This month Medrie MacPhee opened her Qualia: I Feel You exhibition at Vielmetter LA. It was her premier solo show in Los Angeles and her first exhibition with Susanne Vielmetter. The exhibition featured several medium and large canvases from 2023 and 2024, as well as a second installment of her Dark Matter series of smaller works. The exhibition will be on view from June 1 to July 6, 2024.


Press Release

In her newest work, MacPhee creates potently physical paintings composed of ordinary garments, deconstructed, then pulled flat and collaged into a distinct matrix of overlapping organic and rectangular shapes. After decades as a painter of architecturally-inspired Surrealistic landscape paintings, MacPhee shifted her focus to works that play with color and texture in a synthesis of formal improvisation and industrial design. She cuts up found and cast-off garments, then affixes them to large panels, carefully aligning seams, zippers, buttons, or belt-loops to create a new scaffolding. Over this puzzle-like infrastructure, MacPhee reorients the outlines of the garments by painting the entire canvas white. She then paints a new, overlapping—related, but not quite aligned—chromatic grid, often outlining new shapes or existing garments with slim strands of tinted piping. The implied presence of the body—through elements that articulate legs, necks, arms—creates a simultaneously humorous and poignant humanistic pull that echoes tangibly in our subconscious.

The resulting compositions read as tactile presences that might reference a contemporary take on Gee’s Bend quilts in the irregular formal patchwork, Cubistic assemblages that play with edgy contours, and landscapes of gridded agricultural fields seen from above. MacPhee’s working philosophy and practice resonate with artists such as Anni Albers and her focus on innovative textile designs, Harmony Hammond’s materiality and ethos bound to her monochromatic abstractions, and the female Russian Constructivists’ (Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and Natalia Goncharova) revolutionary structural approaches to painting.

MacPhee considers each work an arena of play where the real coexists and complements an imagined verbal/visual language. As the artist says, “the pauses and gaps, the symbiotic relationship between the present and absent, the subterranean level of feeling and instinct that lies under words, and the force of their undertow” are reflected in the new paintings in the exhibition. She describes below the meaning of the evocative title, Qualia: I Feel You.

Qualia is the term philosophers coined to describe an entirely subjective experience associated with the state of consciousness. It is the shadow presence that takes us beyond rational, scientific explanation and, in doing so, is the co-pilot who interprets all sensate experience with simultaneity. Color, shape, musicality, texture, tonality, line, dimensionality come into play immediately and the associations that arise are processed over time.

There is something comedic about a neurologist holding a brain and showing with a pointer where in this gelatinous mass our emotions and sensations are located. In a surrounding culture that is a constant barrage of information processing, we are a species that is using outdated hardware (our bodies) to comprehend the virtual world we have created.

These paintings draw their inspiration through a Beckettian operation of sourcing secondhand clothing and items from the bins of 99 cent stores and charity shops, elevating them into a grander realm. Each painting possesses something of the shapes of the people who wore them but enriched with new possibility. Although not three-dimensional, all the accumulations of seams, textures, colors, notions present both figure and ground “pressed into service.”

As Susan Sontag remarked “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”


Installation views of Qualia: I Feel You

Photos © Jeff McLane courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter LA.
 

Photos © Jeff McLane courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter LA.


Medrie MacPhee included in Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection

15 May, 2023

Medrie MacPhee’s 2020 painting Favela is featured in this book that explores the bold vision and vast range of achievements of women artists working predominantly across North America from the late 1960s into the present moment. The paintings, sculpture and mixed-media works featured are drawn from the Shah Garg Collection, which is dedicated to illuminating the critical role that women have played in shaping the development of abstraction and the narratives of art. Making Their Mark includes two sweeping essays by editors Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel, writings by six scholars, as well as lively texts by 15 artists about the artists who inspire them. Richly illustrated with works by 136 artists.

Find out more and order here.

Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel (ed.), Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, Gregory R. Miller & Co., New York, NY, 2023, 432 pgs.


Video of Medrie MacPhee Discussing Seeing is Knowing

15 May, 2023

Medrie MacPhee openly discusses her creative process in relation to her latest solo exhibition, Seeing is Knowing (Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, March 30 to April 30, 2023). She describes how the breach of applying disassembled clothing onto the canvas allowed her to approach abstract painting in a way she couldn’t before; she responds to the structure and references that they provide and works beyond from there. Produced by Nicholas Metivier Gallery, the video has close up shots of the paintings give a strong sense of their surface and texture.

Click to view on Vimeo | Click to view on Nicholas Metivier Gallery website


Solo Show Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

7 March, 2023

Medrie MacPhee is presenting new paintings at Toronto’s Nicholas Metivier Gallery (190 Richmond Street East), from March 30 to April 30, 2023. The exhibition is titled Seeing is Knowing.

Click here for more information…

Seeing is Knowing continues Medrie MacPhee’s acclaimed series that transforms second hand clothing into an intricate matrix that acts as the foundation for her paintings. Several years ago, she had a breakthrough when she pinned a single sock to a canvas. A major breach in her sensibility, it opened up a new way of working that resisted figurative representation. Instead of looking into space like a window, the collaged fabric brings the focus to the surface. Her recent works engage with the world in different ways, including its references to the body.

MacPhee’s titles help to illustrate her intuitive thought process, connecting abstraction to reality. A rope-like, linear work titled Eva, is an homage to Eva Hesse while a monochromatic blue painting punctuated by two small yellow squares is titled, Canary, (as in the canary in the coal mine metaphor). In other works, she alludes the act of making. I’m Staying, a painting that includes a large section of exposed plaid fabric, protests its inevitable painted surface, and wins.

The exhibition also includes two of MacPhee’s garments which are also made from second-hand clothing. This is the first time these have been exhibited alongside the paintings. While not intended to be worn, they can be and are equipped with zippers and pockets. They emphasize MacPhee’s dark sense of humour, taking what was once considered an anti-feminist skill and subverting it to align with her unique visual language.

“Dark humor is core to my view of humans and their strivings that are always getting in the way of often inchoate emotions. It turns the unbearable, bearable. I don’t make “humorous” paintings but the fact of their existence is. The “architecture” of the painting is braced by the clothing underneath. The clothing has no dignity when it’s being pawed over in a second-hand bin. There’s a kind of Beckett-ian humor in elevating these sad remainders into a new and loftier realm.” – Medrie MacPhee

source: Nicholas Metivier Gallery website


Come A Little Closer at DC Moore Gallery NYC

12 January, 2023

Medrie MacPhee is included in a large group exhibition of small paintings with 70 other artists entitled Come a Little Closer. It runs from January 12 to February 11, 2023 at DC Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY.

“I remember once walking with Jacob Lawrence into his major Phillips Collection exhibition in Washington. On the entrance wall, the curators had made a HUGE mural-sized photo blow-up of one of the works from his Migration Series. It looked stunning. But then as we walked through the show, we came to the same work. Relatively tiny, not much bigger than Jacob’s two hands. It was even more powerful, more mesmerizing, more inviting. It did not need to be wall sized to hold the wall, and that is something that Jake had known.”

Bridget Moore’s memory of a small, powerful Jacob Lawrence painting was the spark for Come a Little Closer, which gathers an unruly sampling of ostensibly “little” works with major impact. We all love big; we love the drama of scale. But intimacy has its own magic, connecting us to the size of books, of faces, of mirrors, of things glimpsed in private, seen by one person at a time. Or not seen in full until the curious viewer steps closer.

The works in this exhibition measure from tiny to 15”. The artists that created them have varied motivations, but all the works are meant to be the size they are; in other words none are preparatory studies. Some play with ideas of “real scale,” some counter our expectations of detail, others luxuriate in the compression of information.

source DC Moore Gallery Press Release


Exhibition Catalog “Words Fail Me”

17 November, 2021

Medrie MacPhee: Words Fail Me is a catalog presenting the works exhibited in the artist’s solo show with the same name at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (January 30 – March 6, 2021). The book includes 13 plates showing the paintings in the exhibition, as well as texts by Amy Sillman and Nicole Eisenman.

“Over time you have unburdened yourself from the rules of depiction and yet you still depict the feeling of being a witness to something, even if it’s the unfolding logic of your own work.” * – Amy Sillman

“Medrie’s work, however, is too smart to insist on its newness. Her paintings show how exciting deliberation can be.” ** – Nicole Eisenman

Download the publication text here.

* Excerpt from Amy Sillman and Medrie MacPhee In Conversation; ** Nicole Eisenman, “Med School, An Essay” in Words Fail Me: Medrie MacPhee, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 2021, 43 pages.


Medrie MacPhee, solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Booth in the A.D.A.A. Art Show at the Armory

15 November, 2021

The Art Dealers Association of America: The Art Show brought together the works from artists around the world represented by 47 galleries. The art fair ran from November 4-7, 2021 a the Park Avenue Armory located in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Upper East Side neighborhood. Tibor de Nagy Gallery was represented by a solo show of new paintings by Medrie MacPhee. Ticket sales from The Art Show raised around $1.2M for Henry Street Settlement, a not-for-profit social service agency in the Lower East Side that provides social services, arts programs and health care services to New Yorkers of all ages. Find out more in this Resnicow and Associates November 8, 2021 news post.