Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Jessica Stockholder’s first solo exhibition in Chicago in 24 years. Door Hinges includes studio works that bridge painting and sculpture alongside an installation that tethers the outside of the gallery to the inside. A winding platform leads the viewers to her latest body of work, Assists. Stockholder’s Assists explore the interstitial space between works of art and their surrounding objects, questioning notions of boundary and dependence while responding to the landscape of the human-made things that has been explored by Stockholder’s work in the past.

The Assists are strapped to found furniture and appliances, sometimes acting as a pedestal for artwork by Stockholder or other artists. The Assist has a symbiotic relationship with its adjoining objects, and indeed cannot stand alone without them.

The evocative space embodied in Stockholder’s paintings communicates something of the interiority of human experience chipping away at the essential aloneness of human beings. Paintings hang on walls; picture-making occurs in relation to surface; architecture provides walls and surface; and architecture is inserted into landscape. Stockholder calls attention to the human processing and resultant transformation of objects from the natural realm. While some of the human-made objects utilized in Door Hinges have celebrated authors, most makers remain anonymous. This is one more way in which she explores questions of framing and context.

The Assists occupy the space between all of these junctures much like hinges occupy the space between a door and its jamb. Door Hinges is presented in conjunction with ASSISTED, a group exhibition curated by Jessica Stockholder.

Jessica Stockholder lives and works in Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions and installations include Erstwhile & Notwithstanding at C.Ar.D: Contemporary Art and Design, Pienello, Italy (2014); Angled Tangle at Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL (2014); Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear at Musee D’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne Metropole, France (2012); Peer Out to See at Palacio de Cristal, Reina Sofia, Madrid (2010); and Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2006). Stockholder was Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University for twelve years and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Jessica Stockholder, Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, will simultaneously unveil her work throughout Chicago this fall in three different venues including the Smart Museum of Art, IN/SITU EXPO CHICAGO, and mk The Restaurant.

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Tags: Jessica Stockholder, Kavi Gupta Gallery, West Loop