Solo show Words Fail Me opens in NYC

22 January, 2021

Medrie MacPhee will be exhibiting a series of new large paintings entitled Words Fail Me from January 30 to March 6, 2021 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City, 11 Rivington Street. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with a conversation between MacPhee and the artist Amy Sillman and an essay by the artist Nicole Eisenman.

Opening reception January 30 – 12-6PM. Reservations are required, click here for details.

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In recent years MacPhee began a fake fashion line (RELAX) for artist friends out of cheap discount clothing. Both “high” and “low” gear of mixed gender were cut up and reassembled into outfits with zippers, buttons, notions, other fabrics, and decorated hoodies. A kind of wearable collage where all of the things that might be considered in a painting such as opacity and transparency, shape and line, color and texture were considered. It was this act that eventually translated into the paintings.

Gradually what had been a “fashion” sideline – within a “gift economy” became translated into her paintings. The process begins in 99 cent store bins and bargain basements. In order to realize the potential of what has become a visual “matrix” or scaffolding – the loose grid of low-rise clothing on canvas suggesting shapes, moves, and colors that are then whitewashed over— she begins to paint, to improvise, to erase, to add until the painting fulfills the promise of the original set of conditions. It’s finally out of that matrix that the painting gradually arrives.

Color gives shape to forms recognizably human in origin where to borrow from Nadia Hebson’s essay in Material Matters (Art and Theory Publishing, Stockholm) “the recondite relationship between clothing and agency can be atomized and gender becomes fluid.” There is no tale to tell but meaning and matter are inextricably bound together in ways that conjure up all that can’t be said.

Source: gallery press release