Drawing is the protagonist and common thread between the three solo shows by Silvia Bächli, Jessica Stockholder, and Allyson Strafella on view at Galleria Raffaella Cortese from May 20, 2021. Each artist has developed their own drawing practice differently, but with the shared desires to cross the boundaries of the sheet of paper, as well as overcome the limits of the frame and of the two-dimensional surface. The medium, in all three exhibitions, takes on a dimension of installation and expresses a desire for osmosis with the spaces it inhabits.
As Germano Celant has suggested, Jessica Stockholder’s works “can also be interpreted as a structural grid that rejects boundaries—between material and chromatic, rigid and soft, artisanal and industrial—, feeding instead on their free geography and relying on the passage from one to the other“. The American/Canadian artist, leader of her generation, has always deconstructed and redefined the boundaries between artistic disciplines—sculpture, painting, drawing, collage—by assembling everyday objects—furniture, chairs, carpets, kitchen tools, building materials—which she then coheres often by using bright, acid and luminous colors, which are not obedient to the contours of the objects. Stockholder’s works bring to bear a unique understanding of the rules of composition, color and form, which together reinvent themselves using synesthesia and creating symbiosis between matter and color. The objects and materials simultaneously lose their intrinsic functionality and at are at the same time mined for the multiplicity of meanings that they contain.
Installation views
