Jessica Stockholder

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its first showing of work by renowned installation artist Jessica Stockholder, featuring the artist's assemblage-based sculpture and new monoprints. As a highly influential pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Stockholder utilizes everyday materials such as buckets, faux fur, artificial fruit and other mass-produced ephemera and integrates them into color-charged and eccentric three-dimensional works. Stockholder references antecedents of American abstraction while utilizing a kind of modern day cultural fabric of domestic objects and easily-obtained cheap, plastic goods reflective of consumerist desires. Always formally based in her vision, by integrating these varied materials and objects she sweeps viewers into a confluence of color and form, creating multi-planed experiences between the pictorial and the physical. From her celebrated large-scale installations to her self-contained sculptural works and monoprints, Stockholder's vivid vocabulary reveals a unique dialogue between disciplines and materials.

Evoking the spirit of Duchampian "readymades," Stockholder conflates sculpture and painting in a mix of improvisational, seemingly playful materiality that becomes a visual sensibility all her own. Influential to a young generation of emerging artists, Stockholder's diversely formal work places her in dialogue with the pivotally important artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and the pioneering Judy Pfaff. Stockholder nods to their uniquely created languages by expressing her own as she elevates found objects into pure form amidst her complex painterly installations. Recognized for illuminating each element within her sculptural works as she exalts in a kind of abundant fullness in form, with Stockholder, "just as Lego pieces preserve their identity no matter what the context, a plastic bucket always remains a plastic bucket. Yet, it is within the symphonic convergence of the sculpture that its specific surface and shape take on a broader formal significance."*

Stockholder's equally progressive recent monoprints, the dimensional "Swiss Cheese Field" series, include elements of photography, wood engraving and other materials such as cut and melted Styrofoam and fake fur. The unique works originated as a tangential series to the artist's massive-scale public art installation, Flooded Chambers Maid, in New York's Madison Square Park in the summer of 2009. The thoughtfully considered monoprints are laser cut, pressed, glued and printed with unexpected and seemingly random juxtapositions. Alluding to the embedded geometry of the natural world, each unique relief print plays on what Stockholder refers to as the elements of "rational and irrational geometry", while revealing the intense process-and-materials approach to her art.

Widely recognized in her field, Jessica Stockholder continues to be, as she has over the years, a source of inspiration to countless artists and curators. Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum's Deputy Director and Polly and Mark Addison Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who is the curator for the installation-based "Embrace!", frequently shares how Stockholder was the first artist selected to anchor his ambitious and progressive exhibition for 2009- 2010. Optical, tactile and essentially material, the artist states that her work "brings chaos to the fore and makes order where there is little or none."

Jessica Stockholder received her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria, Canada and her M.F.A. from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe with works in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the LA County Museum of Art and the Saatchi & Saatchi Collection, London, among others. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions including ones in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Since 1999, Stockholder has been the Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University. Jessica Stockholder's site-specific installation in the Denver Art Museum's "Embrace!" exhibition goes on view November 14, 2009.

* Stephanie Buhmann, The Brooklyn Rail September 2006 "Jessica Stockholder"