Jessica Stockholder was
born in Seattle, Washington in 1959. She studied painting at the
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA
from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending
installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary
art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall
pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s
complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they
have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling,
and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding
landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic,
but close observation reveals formal decisions about color and
composition, and a tempering of chaos with control. In a single
work, Stockholder deploys a myriad of materials that might include
bales of hay, fruit, toys, laundry baskets, curtains, heat lamps,
fans, yarn, newspaper, bowling balls, automobiles, and construction
materials—bricks, concrete, plywood, and sheetrock. Bringing
the vibrant, Technicolor plastic products of consumer culture to
her work, she later adds painted areas of bright purple, turquoise,
pink, orange and green, calibrating each color for maximum optical
and spatial impact. Stockholder’s installations, sculptures,
and collages affirm the primacy of pleasure, the blunt reality
of things, and the rich heterogeneity of life, mind, and art amid
a vortex of shifting polarities—abstraction/realism, classical
order/intuitive expressionism, conscious thought/unconscious desire.
Jessica Stockholder is Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture
at Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at Dia Center for
the Arts, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
P.S. 1, New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Venice Biennale; Kunstmuseum
St. Gallen; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York | Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin
Jessica Stockholder on the Art21 blog |
