100 Women of Spirit catalog essay

100 Women of Spirit

Zürcher Gallery, New York

A group show dedicated to Joan Mitchell

June 25 - July 18, 2024

Since 2020, the Salon Zürcher has been reborn. Focusing on women artists, 11 Women of Spirit, the tradition of the salon as an intimate place to encounter art, where one can spend serious time looking, is again very much alive. Every May and September, the Zürcher gallery presents 11 women artists, in a mini art fair which runs parallel to Frieze and the Armory Show. With this exhibition, 11 Women of Spirit Part 9, their number has reached nearly one hundred. This is not only the occasion to celebrate the nine prior editions of 11 Women of Spirit but also the opportunity to look to the future, to a new salon in September 2024, the first edition of 100 Women of Spirit+.

The word salon conjures many meanings. As a domestic space, it has a long history, from the literary salon of the French elite women in the 17th and 18th century to the salon of the transnational avant-garde of the likes of Gertrude Stein in Paris and Florine Stettheimer in New York. For the ‘women of spirit’ of preceding centuries, culture was emancipatory, hosting poets, artists, musicians, and writers gave them an agency that they did not have in the public sphere.

The French expression, ‘femmes d’esprit’, implies cultured and sophisticated conversations, witty exchanges but also something more spiritual, something signals that these women wanted to be considered more than just a passive subject, obedient and submissive. The agency carried by the word in French is even stronger in English as the word also possessed the implication of energy which it does not really have in its French version.

From the beginning, the historical character of the ‘Femme d’esprit’ was central in shaping the idea for the nine exhibitions. 11 Women of Spirit is part of a long empowering history, with a strong legacy. Today, the artistic and cultural spheres are no longer the only places where women can have an impact, 11 Women of Spirit is an homage to all the women of the far and more recent pasts who embraced art.

Through art, either as makers or as supporters, as artists, patrons, gallerists, and collectors, they found ways to assert their own voice and left inspiring marks on history. For many years, the Zürcher Gallery has been committed to show historical women artists who have been forgotten, giving them again the visibility they deserved. Thanks to a series of important exhibitions of the works of Regina Bogat, Merrill Wagner, Alice Adams, June Leaf, Lynn Umlauf, Alix Le Méléder and Kazuko Miyamoto, we realized, not only the art historical importance of their oeuvre, but that these artists had long and productive careers. While most of these artists are now in their 80s and 90s, they have opened the door for the next generation.

11 Women of Spirit was born from the desire of the gallery to answer the legitimate demand for visibility from the next generation of women artists. With 11 Women of Spirit, Gwenolee Zürcher is creating a wider context for the historical artists she has been supporting. Each artist who has taken part in the nine editions of 11 Women of Spirit gives more relevance to her original project, creating a lineage between the generations. 11 Women of Spirit comes together in an organic way, there is no theme. Each edition is shaped by an informal network of connections.

Edition after edition, 11 Women of Spirit has become a community, the artists, once selected by Gwenolee Zürcher, participate in one show, coming together as a group at the openings of each edition. This sense of community extends beyond the walls of the gallery, some of the women of spirit meet informally, they have grown their own network, and exhibition opportunities supporting each other. The diversity of each 11 Women of Spirit demonstrates clearly that this organic system of recommendation works. While the format may be reminiscent of cooperative galleries such as A.I.R Gallery, founded in 1972, which showed the works of some of the gallery’s artists like Kazuko Miyamoto, the atmosphere of 11 Women of Spirit is different.

As decades have gone by since the early breakthrough of the feminist artists, some of Women of Spirit commented on how the mood has changed since the 1960s, the debates and the issues have shifted, leaving more space for the art. Ultimately what all these artists have in common, beyond style, beyond media, is confidence in their practice. Through the years, they have gained a certain distance, a certain wiseness and maturity.

Gwenolee Zürcher’s long term vision for her gallery allows for an insightful formula to work, while she is listening to and learning from the artists, she sees the 11 Women of Spirit as part of a larger endeavor. Her vision is informed by art history, her love of the modern art tradition, her interest in process and for the idiosyncrasy of the different artistic mediums. The artists stand on solid ground and make ambitious works, that pay attention toprocess and to the integrity of their medium.

Since 2020, nine editions of 11 Women of Spirit have brought visibility to the work of nearly one hundred artists, in an acknowledgment that art making is a life-long commitment. What these exhibitions have accomplished is creating a community across generations, by allowing for a strong network of support to develop, these exhibitions have become a springboard for many women artists.

100 Women of Spirit is the celebration of the coherence between a gallerist, her vision, and the artists she chooses to support. It is only fair that this exhibition be dedicated to Joan Mitchell, a woman of spirit ‘par excellence’ who supported other women artists and who is such a central presence in the Zürcher gallery. As we look to the future to 100 Women of Spirit+, we acknowledge the longevity of women’s art practice, their dedication to their art and their resilience.

Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Ph.D.

Art historian, co-founder of Women Art Dealers Digital Archives, co-chair of The International Art Market Studies Association, section editor the Bloomsbury Art Market and Former Director of Christie’s Education in New York, 2002-2021.

10X Relay Cat’s Cradle catalog essay

Catalog essay by Lisa Taliano for 10X Relay Cat's Cradle exhibition, February 2020, Indiana University Irwin D. Miller School of Architecture; September 2019, UT Knoxville, Downtown Gallery.

Curators: Jackie Meier and Lisa Taliano.

Artists: Kylie Heidenheimer, Pinkney Herbert, Erick Johnson, Jackie Meier, Laura Newman, Pierre Obando, Jennifer Riley, Russell Roberts, Lisa Taliano and Chuck Webster.

The painters in 10 X Relay represent a cross section of artists in New York City that are keeping vital the tradition of abstract painting in America. The exhibition grew out of the connections between people and paintings in a direct and personal way.  It started out as a conversation over dinner among friends and turned into a collaborative experiment and a stress test of the ties that bind us together as a community created through a shared language and the obsession to paint.

Why Abstract Painting?

How can we say anything new in painting? The canvas never starts off empty. It is always covered in clichés. Clichés are everywhere – images that circulate through the external world and penetrate our internal world. Our perceptions and our canvases are full of clichés by which we think and feel.  Abstract painting, when successful, is a way to rid ourselves of the clichés that regulate our lives. Abstraction can serve to undo the synthesis of our perceptions, the optical organization of the cliché, through the free interplay of non-representational and non-signifying lines and colors.

To paint today one must come to see the surface as Gilles Deleuze described in his Logic of Sensation, not as empty or flat, but as intense: filled with the unseen forces of other strange possibilities, mixed and assembled in transformable and deformable ways. [1]  Abstraction in this sense is not about the flattening of illusionistic space, or the elimination of figure and narrative; it is not a retreat into pure painterly self-reference; it is an invention of other spaces with original sorts of mixtures, taking elements from all over, past and present, and making odd connections and re-assemblages.

Clement Greenberg argued that abstraction in each art form should appeal only to the sense which perceived its effect, excluding whatever is related to any other sense, and by virtue of its medium attain an exclusive domain. Abstract painting then would only concern itself with what is purely optical.  He pointed to Pollock as an artist whose work attained pure “opticality”.  Deleuze, on the other hand, argues that Pollocks pictorial space departs from the purely optical to discover more haptic forms of spacialization. He claims that Pollock discovers a pictorial space that comes before the optical field of contoured delimited figures in illusionistic space, and therefore cannot simply be derived from them by means of purification or the flattening of perspective. Through his abstract line with its “variable direction, tracing no contour and delimiting no form, ceaselessly diverging and bifurcating” [2], Pollock achieves an uncentered, unbounded, and formless condition, by which he discovers a force or potential inherent in pictorial space itself.  “Abstraction can no longer be understood as the emptying of illusionistic space of figures and stories; it is a “sensation” of this larger abstract space that precedes and exceeds them”[3]. Greenberg’s account of the modernist project and the development of abstract painting as a move towards self-referential flatness and the rejection of illusionistic space is not sufficient. “Far from resulting from stripping illusionistic space bare, abstraction is something prior to it – something that comes first.”[4] Painting is abstract from the outset.  It is so in Prehistoric times. Classical European illusionism is merely a late development in an essentially abstract art. Through Pollock, we come to see that the motivation of abstraction is not to strip painting from all concrete context to attain pure formal opticality; it is to offer sensations of things that can be seen only through the experience of the collapse of the visual, the undoing of the cliché.

Cezanne talks about this very experience when he says that painters must look beyond the landscape to its chaos, where one no longer sees forms or matter but only forces, densities, intensities.[5]   This is what he called the world before humanity – a complete collapse of visual coordinates. Afterwards, he said, you can let the world back in with its “stubborn geometry”,  but only with the risk that it may once again disappear.

Sensations are pre-rational, empirical events measured through the human body. They are the world of “lived experience” coextensive but distinct from the world of perception and representation. Abstraction reveals the forces or intensities that lie behind the sensations, the underlying relationships and processes between things. Sensation is given, but the condition of sensation is shaped by the underlying abstract force. This abstract space or force that proceeds optical organized perception is the common ground of all the arts and understanding. An unexpected twist in the abstract story, instead of closing painting off from other art forms and disciplines, abstraction serves to re-connect it to them in an unforeseen way.

What does it mean to think abstractly?

In the philosophical tradition one abstracts as one moves up higher levels of generality, to arrive at universal Forms, or Ideas. Deleuze breaks with tradition and rethinks philosophical abstraction.  According to him, the traditional view relies on the basic assumption that the world is logically consistent with possibilities given by abstractions. “Once one allows for a world that is disunified, incongruous, and composed of multiple divergent paths, one starts to see the force or potential of things for which there exists no abstract concept, since their effectuation would go off in too many directions or “senses” at once.”[6] Instead, we can think of abstraction in terms of immanent force rather than transcendental form. The passage of one kind of abstraction to the other involves a change in seeing: rather than seeing Forms or Ideas illuminated from within Reason, one must learn to see a prior immanent condition that illuminates multiple paths and connections outward.

In both philosophical and artistic abstraction, we leave behind the idea of abstraction as a process of extracting pure Forms, in favor of an abstraction that consists in an impure mixing, prior to Forms. Abstraction is not to discover truths in some ideal Form, but to discover connections in the multiplicity, to see how things have within them the potential for other things and the possibility to create new things.

In the process of organizing this show together, we resisted the temptation to turn inward, pushed ourselves to look outward to see connections between ourselves, other artists, and other disciplines, to find the how and where we intersect, passing back and forth ideas, finding different patterns, adding new knots to the mix.  The patterns that we pass back and forth are nothing but the sensual manifestations of the connecting forces of an unlimited groundless abstract space; temporary structures that house our thoughts and feelings which depart from the fixed coordinates that enfold our lives, sensation constructs that are in turn open to mixing and change.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)

[2] John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 69.

[3] Ibid, p. 70.

[4] Ibid, p. 71.

[5] Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation”,  Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. xxi.

[6] Rajchman, p. 64.

Incise, Echo and Repeat catalog essay

by Camilla Fallon and Kylie Heidenheimer for the exhibition and catalog Incise, Echo & Repeat, January 28 - March 3, 2019, Abrazo Gallery, The Clemente, NYC

Participating artists: JoAnne Carson, Susanna Coffey, Elisabeth Condon, Camilla Fallon, Kylie Heidenheimer, Pinkney Herbert, Mary Jones, Amy Mahnick, Laura Newman, Sirikil Pattachote, Walter Schrank, Clintel Steed, Mie Yim.

These painters twist and fracture the space within the frame in myriad ways. A few reference still life, nature, and urban spaces that include construction sites and aerial views. Others fracture the space with gesture and activate it in the paintings frame through geometric or organic linear division. Fracturing and fragmenting exists in various formsand serves different purposes. In nature there is order and disorder. Fracturing can be arbitrary, as in an earthquake,or ordered, as in the way a crystal or schist breaks with the same or similar patterning. Geometry always plays a role in both painting and nature. Fractured space is one manifestation and it can be architectural and ordered, or chaotic, explosive or fragmented.

Carson says “a defining factor of our age” is “the shift from ‘organic’ to ‘synthetic’ nature.” Her intention is clear in “Hole Jumper,” where flowers exist as drastically irregular and awkwardly crystalline. Condon’s work is “derived from Chinese landscape paintings,” and her “scenes boldly visualize a . . .multi-layered world.” (Lily Wei) This is evident in the patched and fitted backgrounds in “American Bird” and “Secret Understory.” Herbert’s recent work has been described by Frederic Koeppel as “pent-up power and desire that resonates with a peculiar blend of animated and meditative qualities.” This mixture is part fractured backgrounds, as we see in “Searchlight.” Yet this piece’s frontal plane contains still-larger broken areas that re-form into a new, complete shape.

The literal subject of Fallon’s“Isoceles” and “Center” is a “construction site with complicated scaffolding.” Yet in it, “geometric shapes form and repeat in overlapping patterns, and engage in space-twisting, fracturing, and fragmenting.” At other times symmetrical, broad shapes come together in a whole in a manner that is akin to Herbert’s. Newman’s “Heat” also pulsates with broad surface breakups, creating spatial tension between the latter and depth. She accomplishes this via color that “is saturated and matte” and with space that is “warped” and lines that are “active and almost three-dimensional.” (Jennifer Riley) Heidenheimer’s “Chamber” and “Garden” twist and wrest space within the frames and lines often run past and off their edges. They seem to indicate, as Stephen Maine writes, that “something is going on outside or underneath [their] skin.”

While Coffey’s portraits are steeped in observation (at times with herself before a photo mural in front of a mirror), their roles extend beyond it. She comments on the “we” that central figure and background evoke. (AnnLandi) Fragments piece together such meta focus in the foliage of “Green” and the flowers of “Flowery Skull.” Steed say of his paintings that they are “the explosion of an image and the impact that it makes.” He also notes that “the way we live life right now . . .there is a lot of jumbling. Everything becomes fractured.” “Robotic Legs” reflects the latter via an aerial view of conjoined bricolage. Amy Mahnick’s still lives are often of sculpture she creates.“The sculpture I’m painting now is a shell made of fragments lined with pink felt that elicits an emotional response . . .” “Blue Aggregate” and “#7” become fractured, seemingly in accordance with the spatial directions and tension the set-ups elicit.

For Pattachote, guides are “the laws of nature and three characteristics of existence in Buddhist Dharma: impermanence,incompleteness, and non-self.” In “Folding Heart” and “Connect,” breaks are literal with regard to the sheets of paper that she joins. She paints delicate transparencies and drips on them and includes occasional fragments of paper. The transparencies act as a veil, while the drips further fragment the image. Of her canvases, Peter Frank writes that Mary Jones “practices a heterogeneous gesturality, evoking cosmologies of paint in colorful,almost galactic explosions of brushstrokes . . . ” In “Lion” and “The Renaissance”, Jones uses X-rays and feather wallpaper to create inlays that shimmer between the literal and the suggested. Schrank’s paintings have fluidity, yet marks and colors fracture and fragment the surface with poetic, light-filled gestures. At first abstract, they piece together in ways suggestive of nature and interiors. In her statement, Yim describes “the tension of . . .illustrative figures” and “floppy paint obliterating them, letting abstraction come through . . .” Bulging, bound beings in“Handicap” and “Beast” contain curvilinear lines and shapes in contrast to many others’ rectilinear forms, which incise,echo, and repeat.

Bursts, Atmosphere and Stasis catalog essay

Kylie Heidenheimer, Bursts, Atmosphere and Stasis exhibition, Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio, 2008; The Italian Academy at Columbia University, NYC, 2007

Lost and Found in Space

The stretched canvas is a paradox, delineating the expansiveness of boundless space. Its edges circumscribe an imaginative frontier. It intensifies the illusion of infinitude by marking it off, by framing and containing it. Once and for all, it fixes the evanescent.

The artificially, arbitrarily enclosed expanse of space as a microcosm of experience is analogous to the garden, the corral, the kitchen, the petri dish, the snow globe, standup comedy, lunar modules, novels, and pictures.

Painters feel their way forward into charged but uncharted pictorial space. Or they just barge right in, unannounced. The first thing the viewer notices about Kylie Heidenheimer’s work is how carefully considered her decisions are. Each brush stroke, splash, drip or puddle--even those that seem spontaneous--are survivors of the artist’s editorial eye. Every feature of her paintings has to earn its pictorial worth. A brush is the ideal tool to facilitate access to the space of the painting's support, transporting and releasing pigment with a minimum of biomechanical effort and reducing the lag time between the impulse and its expression. For a few years, Heidenheimer forsook the brush for other means. In paintings such as Glade and Solid As Ether she obviates her touch by means of sponges, pools and pours, courting the chance occurrence, the happy accident. Drips sit aloft, nuggets of color adrift on washing waves. Surfers talk about “the green room,” that static, organic space within the cresting wave’s onrushing tube. Painters know a certain clotted crawl space, similarly exhilarating to attempt and monumentally indifferent to individual failure. Confronting that tradition has been a vital chapter in Heidenheimer’s search for a distinctive and dramatic choreography of surface and trace.

In essence, painting transforms goop--whether pigmented oil, tinted acrylic polymer, or some other malleable substance possessing evocative chroma, that will adhere for a substantial period of time to a vertical surface--into pictorial experience. The only other prerequisite is the viewer’s willingness to allow that, in certain circumstances and in the right hands, that goop can get to something grand, can reward scrutiny by engaging the eye and transporting the imagination. This exquisite anomaly underlies Heidenheimer’s simultaneously concrete and ephemeral paintings. The self-evident materials don’t quickly translate into pictorial meaning but cling to the meaning of their materiality. Irrefutably present, they somehow contain the psychic weight of absence, make the painting look as if something is going on outside its frame or underneath its skin that informs its appearance, but the exact nature of which remains unknown.

Despite the subdued, black/white/gray palette of works like Lights and Cape, such pictures testify to the artist’s mastery of fundamental painterly devices: washes underlying body color, warm and cool tonalities, scampering and slithering mark making, shadow versus sheen. Then there is the crepuscular, mysterious Mead, the most object-like of the major recent canvases. In its shallow, tactile space, we might be inspecting the streaming wall of a cave. Here the artist’s taste for the square format makes inarguable visual sense. There is no suggestion of lateral movement, only the stasis of entrapment and pressure. 

Raceway does this too, complicating the familiar sensation of a receding, distinctly watery plane, approximated by lazily horizontal strokes, with a hail of manganese blue. Frank Stella once remarked that the Abstract Expressionists “got into trouble at the corners,” by which he meant to indicate the faultless logic of his own designs. But the corners of Raceway define its program: earth, ocean, vapor, shell. Within them is glorious confusion.

This exhibition heralds an unexpectedly new beginning for the artist, as here we have before us a radiant new triptych called Lucky Stripes. Nothing heretofore has prepared us for its finesse, its jittery shimmer, its distinctly aquatic matrix of calligraphic marks, its rainbow-hued smoke on the water. A strong, hot orange and a high, clear blue mark its chromatic extremes, with dry-brush red and staining white lightly strewn about in a manner that yields an atmospheric haze that the artist half-jokingly refers to as “fast space.” As does Heidenheimer’s earlier work, Lucky Stripes willfully conflates the veiling and the veiled. But here the veil of the stretched canvas itself is brought into the conversation by means of canvas-colored paint that fuses figure and ground, skin and support.

For most of the twenty-five years she has painted in New York, Heidenheimer has worked a vein that has been in art-world fashion’s dustbin. Gestural abstraction was spurned by received wisdom, which let only a few feisty talents through its filter of taste: Joan Snyder, Louise Fishman, Pat Steir, Pat Passlof. The recent, overdue mainstream recognition of the achievement of Joan Mitchell has helped to prompt a greater receptiveness to this venerable, irony-free idiom. Intuition was a dirty word until a few years ago. Kylie Heidenheimer’s painting belongs to a lineage of open-ended, utopian abstraction guided by faith in the integrity of intuition. Pictorial fact is implied rather than stated, tapping into the part of the viewer’s brain engaged with becoming rather than being. The opposite of illustration, her work pursues the phantom image.

--Stephen Maine