Alicia McCarthy
17 September - October 16, 2021
Opening reception
Friday, 17 September, 6-8pm
Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Alicia McCarthy’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will inaugurate Jack Hanley’s new gallery space on 177 Duane Street in TriBeCa and will feature new McCarthy paintings in her distinct visual vocabulary. In twisted knots, intertwined arcs and lines shaped like hourglasses, streams of color seem to flow up and down in time, holding center at crossroads.
Alicia McCarthy’s abstract compositions combine complex details and patterns with raw painterly gestures, her drawings and paintings lure the eye into a maze of lines in which it is easy to get lost the closer you look. Remnants of paint drips, pencil tests and splashes, smears, and traces of spray paint reveal the surfaces’ pasts, often accompanying the artist in her studio. The paintings come to existence long before the panel is drawn or painted on. 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, soft pastel, flashe paint, latex - or spray paint. 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 widely exhibited across America and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, OH, at SFMoMA as part of the SECA Award show and the Berkley 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, Amer- ican 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@jackhanley.com