ART CITIES:N.York-Cathy Wilkes

Cathy Wilkes is part of the generation of artists who emerged in the mid-90s. She is primarily known for her large-scale installations of seemingly disparate objects, many of which are distressed, damaged, altered or adapted. Her ensembles slowly evolve out of a working method that begins with the meticulous collection and selection of materials and ends with the measured task of arrangement, re-arrangement, making and re-making.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA PS1 Archive

The first monographic exhibition of Cathy Wilkes in New York is on presentation at MoMA PS1, the exhibition features 50 works from Public and Private Collections throughout Europe and North America as well as new works created especialy for the exhibition, offering a broad view of Wilkes’s work since 2004. Over more than two decades, Cathy Wilkes has created a body of work that engages with the rituals of life, combining paintings, drawings, sculptures, and objects both found and altered. Regularly employing quotidian products and residual materials drawn from her domestic life and environment in Glasgow, Wilkes’s installations connect the banalities of daily existence to larger archetypes of birth, marriage, child rearing, and death. This combination of the personal and universal parallels a meditation at the heart of her work, exposing deeply felt subjective experiences while also insisting upon the fundamentally private nature of artmaking. Wilkes’s individual installations and larger exhibitions are marked by arrangements of objects that appear both precarious and precise, vulnerable and brutal. She often recomposes older pieces into new variations, and has more recently applied a similar approach to the design of her solo exhibitions. Repurposing select elements of extant works and combining them into new installations, Wilkes upends the “retrospective” structure of a mid-career exhibition, confounding experiences of past and present and challenging conventions of art history that would seek to interpret her work in a clear progression. Eschewing the framing or supports typical to exhibition display, Wilkes emphasizes a direct interaction with her work. Visitors are invited to carefully wander among installations whose boundaries are not always obvious, heightening attention to the shifting relationships between various elements in her works.

Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, New York, Duration: 22/10/17-11/3/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, http://momaps1.org