Lauren O’Neill-Butler on Elaine Reichek
“In a while, I might carry out a extra subtle maneuver by doubling again on and reversing the injunction in opposition to AbEx, performing a critique of the critique, one which allowed me to acceptable AbEx as a observe again into my very own palms and twist it into the shape I needed it to imagine.” This line from Amy Sillman’s fabulous essay “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls: In Protection of Summary Expressionism II”—printed in these pages in 2011—got here to thoughts as I considered Elaine Reichek’s second solo present at Marinaro, “Materials Lady,” the place she turned her gimlet eye onto the lengthy interlaced historical past connecting portray, abstraction, and textiles.
Hugging a nook and an adjoining wall of the gallery, respectively, had been JP Textile/Textual content 1 and a couple of, each 2021. At first look, they gave the impression to be discovered objects, comprising lengthy swaths of mottled material stretched out from wall-mounted steel dispensers. But after a bit extra time with these works, I noticed that Reichek was poking enjoyable at Jackson Pollock’s overcooked legacy (and at Harold Rosenberg’s designation of lazy AbEx as “apocalyptic wallpaper”). Every bit showcases a size of Kravet Inc.’s Spatter material—a commercially printed textile with an allover Jack-the-Dripper effluence—onto which Reichek digitally stitched twenty-five citations pulled from the artist’s capacious bibliography. From Jackson Pollock, Frank O’Hara’s 1959 e book on the painter, to a 2017 quantity of the Artist Collection from New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork, every reference was given its personal distinct font and positioned inside the composition—in a curved or sloped line, in a circle, or crisscrossed with one other textual content—at the very least 3 times over the size of the material. Utilizing two variations of Spatter, Reichek mimicked the textile’s colorways with a number of equally hued threads. Consequently, Pollock’s vital, industrial, and mainstream successes had been introduced down a peg by Reichek’s difficult and intelligent model of shade—a “twisting” à la Sillman.
On a close-by wall, twenty-six variously sized digitally and hand-sewn embroideries had been hung salon fashion. The set up appeared like a compendium of works by artists who’ve depicted style, inside design, and different types of angewandte kunst throughout the centuries—from Albrecht Dürer’s renderings of pillows and a Michelangelo material research to Edgar Degas’s bows and Eugène Delacroix’s Algerian robes, to Varvara Stepanova’s sportswear and, my private favourite, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s depiction of a faceless Pierrot. Additionally on view had been borrowings from Bronzino, John Currin, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kerry James Marshall, Wayne Thiebaud, and Édouard Vuillard, amongst many others. It was amusing to guess which work had been made manually by Reichek and which had not (trace: The extra densely threaded items had been digital), after which to appreciate that every piece basically introduced portray again to its grounds, i.e., to canvas, to material.
Just a few extra works containing excerpts from writings by Tracy Chevalier, Susan Howe, and Barbara Pym recalled Reichek’s final solo outing at this gallery, “Sight Unseen,” which featured embroideries that borrowed strains from tales, performs, and poems. (Keep in mind that the phrases textual content and textile each come from the Latin texere, to weave.) Turkey-Work (Susan Howe), 2020, for instance, quoted the titular poet’s strains on “some of the misunderstood supplies in ornamental artwork research,” a type of needlework that has roots in sixteenth-century England—a bastardization of the weaving method used to make Turkish carpets. Suitably, a bright-red turkey-work body surrounds the textile.
In a second room, Reichek staged a tongue-in-cheek homage to Henri Matisse: Set onto a commercially made carpet with natural patterns primarily based on the painter’s cutouts had been examples of the varieties of parlor furnishings Matisse owned alongside a number of potted Monstera crops (whose varieties impressed the artist to create the cutouts) and a double-sided inexperienced velvet folding display. Photos of those partitions may be discovered all through his oeuvre, and onto hers Reichek affixed an assortment of ready-made Matissean merchandise, with photos of his studios and supply imagery, emphasizing his colonialist and sexist gaze. Fantastically researched, the set up additionally included a grid of swatches reproducing Matisse’s Blue Nude II, 1952, and brightly hued, hand-embroidered reproductions of his notes for 3 of his tapestry works. Imitation is the sincerest type of flattery, but Reichek’s work will not be mediocre by any stretch of the creativeness, as few artists have deconstructed and dismantled the parable of the modernist male “genius” as tartly as she has.
— Lauren O’Neill-Butler
