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.

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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)