LINDA FLEMING | Inside Outside Through

“My most recent works project the sense of having never had another history but their own. They allow multiple focus points to create a shifting concentration of form and color that unfolds through the viewer’s changing position. You can see the object, the interior of the object, and through the object simultaneously while multiple colors mix in your eye to become a color that isn’t physically there. My works are my best attempt to use the physical arena to try out my perceptual observations. Always waiting to be let in on the secret of existence, I realized that I had to find it myself bit by bit over a lifetime. Making has allowed me to follow these questions to ever more elaborate questions and out onto limbs that force me back to the main trunk of the tree, pulled by the hope of seeing deeper into the nature of being.

In my mind, these varied works depend on each other to complete the complexity of my investigation. Nothing exists except in relation to something else as stated in quantum physics. All of these works equally explore physicality and existence. All are ways of being. Each thing is an invitation to the next idea and the trail of forms define an accumulated vision without beginning or end that is brought into being by listening to those quiet, simple first questions… what… why… how. 

We are not just who we become, but everything we ever were.”

- Linda Fleming

In “Inside Outside Through,” Linda Fleming continually refines and amplifies her language of complex rectilinear and curvilinear forms which offer equal consideration to the potentialities of the ephemeral and the fluidly architectonic. Known for her dynamic, free-standing, large-scale outdoor works and evanescent, light-responsive, or painted wall sculptures, Fleming’s distinct visual language and extensive study of the natural world continues to unfold with each new exploration of form, surface, and impactful, often vibrant color. Even as Fleming’s exacting drawing practice informs all of her work, the meticulously hand-cut maquettes, which often become the genesis for larger sculptures, are regarded by the artist as not so much as models, but rather, as the embodiment of idea into form. At once, cosmologic, and earth-bound, the current artwork on view follows Fleming’s recent retrospective exhibition, “Experimenta de Vacuo Spatio,” at the Kaneko art center. As a seasoned artist, selections of Fleming’s work from the 1960s to the present day made their mark then and now to reaffirm her standing as a formidable voice in contemporary art.  

Linda Fleming attended the San Francisco Art Institute and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She was a professor at California College of the Arts from 1986 to 2017 and held the position of Sculpture Department Chair from 1988 to 2000. She has received numerous prestigious recognitions including those from the International Sculpture Center, Peter S. Reed, Adolph & Ester Gottlieb, and Pollack-Krasner foundations. Her work is in the permanent collections of Santa Clara University, the Berkeley Art Museum, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Oakland Museum of California, University of Wyoming, Stanford University Museum, and Albuquerque Museum along with additional collections both public and private. Noteworthy exhibitions include Fleming’s recent KANEKO retrospective “Experimenta de Vacuo Spatio,” “Confluence,” exhibited at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and “Making Places,” at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, as well as her touring exhibition featuring the artist’s extensive and intricate maquette series entitled, “Linda Fleming: Modeling the Universe” originating at the Nevada Art Museum and “Drawn To/Drawn From: A 45 Year Survey” at Oats Park Art Center, Fallon, Nevada; “Glimmer,” a site-specific sculpture for the Oakland Museum of Art, exhibited in the OMCA’s iconic sculpture gardens; and Robischon Gallery’s 2016 exhibition “DECLARATION,” in which Fleming’s work was exhibited alongside other historically important and esteemed artists: Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Bernhard, Helen Frankenthaler, Ann Hamilton, Jae Ko, Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, Judy Pfaff, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker.