Colored Grounds and Perfect Xs

G Fine Art begins its 2015 season with the rousing exhibition “Colored Grounds and Perfect Xs” featuring new work by Maggie Michael. Of the artist’s work, scholar Jessica Horton wrote,

“White’s presumed neutrality had emerged as a glaring problem linking studio, classroom, and street. (Michael) began to cover her canvases in blue, green, gray, and orange…It is an act that reintegrates the ground in a network of human and material relations, connecting artist and paint with all that is above, below, inside, and outside the canvas.”

With “Colored Grounds and Perfect Xs” Michael creates a visual vocabulary­­ from paint pours, stencils, and drawn elements. The tensions between distinctive components make these paintings pulse with ample associations. Starting with the colored ground, the works may challenge received knowledge that informs critical consciousness. Building up from there, Michael centers her practice on decoding “American” elements of painting, particularly those from privileged system.

The Perfect X series links to Colored Grounds; marking where one line/incident/work encounters another. Michael engages the X as a structure and a multi-faceted symbol, open to interpretation and connected to both everyday and arcane signification. As the artist describes it, “The first line is, perhaps, incidental. The second line is, no doubt, an assertion. An X is to be found and dealt with.”

A number of inspirations inform Michael’s creative process: elements from Kazimir Malevich’s Russian constructivist paintings meet up with ideas from Giorgio Agamben’s contemporary philosophy, and Brazilian author’s Clarice Lispector’s unconventional, fluid writing.  These disparate elements commix through Michael’s endless curiosity in the possibilities for abstraction. Ultimately, Michael’s painted queries reveal a persistent interest in the planes where mind and matter intersect.  Michael reflects, “What plane conveys a view that is simultaneously straightforward and esoteric, humorous and alarming, secretive yet descriptively detailed?”