Jack Hanley Gallery is excited to present Alicia McCarthy’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, showing new paintings and works on paper.
McCarthy’s abstract compositions combine complex details and patterns with raw painterly gestures. In her signature elements of weaves, twisted knots and intertwined arcs, rainbows and bands of color, her drawings and paintings lure the eye into a dense maze of lines in which it is easy to get lost the closer you look. Remnants of paint drips and splashes, smears, pencil tests and traces of spray paint reveal the surfaces’ pasts, often accompanying McCarthy in her studio for long periods of time. This immediacy bares an intimacy between artist and object and carries the artist’s own physicality into each work.
In tracing the lines, her distinct handmade quality is palpable throughout a variety of media including pencil, graphite, latex - or spray paint. Surfaces ranging from construction paper, over found wood to panels. Both the exploration of media and the use of paint as well as the compositions themselves, balance chance and control, order and chaos, and choose imperfections over sleekness.
Alicia McCarthy (b. 1969) lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. McCarthy has exhibited across America and internationally. Most recently, she had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, OH, at SFMoMA as part of the SECA Award show and a two person show at the Berkeley Art Museum. McCarthy has received numerous accolades and residencies, most notably from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Headland Arts Center and New Langton Art, San Francisco. Public collections with works by the artist include: MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA and Oakland Museum of California.
For more information, please contact Silke Lindner-Sutti at silke@jackhanley.com