SOME THREADS ARE LOOSELY TIED

‘Some Threads are Loosely Tied’ (STaLT) is Maggie Michael’s (1974, USA) approach to recognizing that the connection of topics, histories, people, locations, emotions, moments,… is a risky, thrilling and flirtatious business. According to Michael, to connect the disparate and familiar is where the ample liberties of being an artist can be seriously playful and desirable, but also open-ended and frustrating. ‘Some Threads are Loosely Tied’ is the first solo exhibition of Maggie Michael in Europe.

‘As time passes in excess and emancipation, the paint nonchalantly floats along the surface, dives into its phantasmagoric depth, and penetrates hidden layers of a seemingly absent narrative. Michael’s work is a volcanic landscape of rebellious form, organic desire of expressionistic nature. The air is a silent ally; the pressure – a facilitator and accomplice of a new geometry yet to come. The painting is a procesual confession and intimate uprising, enchanted performance of its own, a post-romantic longing for a paradigm, alphabet of lyrical speech beyond deception.

Storylines intersect and multiply in a feverish choreography, thought threads are tied in an act of uncontrolled transgression, elemental forms collide on the verge of memory and oblivion: Michael’s art is a whisper and a cry, a poetic gesture of ultimate generosity and pictorial justice. If ‘poetry is the language of nonchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language’ (Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi), Michael’s tapestries of painterly abstraction, woven of serendipity and a thoughtful action, both collective and individual, private and public, simultaneously political and withdrawn, are streams of corporeal consciousness, a melodic virtuoso of linguistic surface tension.’

Adam Budak, curator, on Maggie Michael’s work