ART CITIES:Paris-Jessica Stockholder
Although extremely “situated” and unpublished, this work fits easily into the practice of Jessica Stockholder, considered since the 1980s as one of the pioneers of contemporary art to produce singular installations, between accumulation and chaos. The fruit of recycling and recovery, his works blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, reality and abstraction, while delicately embodying, through the reign of objects, the poetry of everyday life.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Nathalie Obadia Gallery
The exhibition “Paper Works in Kathmandu” reveals a collection of paper works, “bas reliefs” made by Jessica Stockholder in a pure artisan tradition during an artistic residency in 2019 in Nepal. Invited by the art production company Kathmandu Projects, Jessica Stockholder spent several weeks in the Nepalese capital learning about the Lokta papermaking technique, in a workshop located on a hill overlooking the city center. This paper is produced from the fibrous bark of lokta, a type of local evergreen plant also known as Daphne. Both an artistic residence and a cultural retreat, this experience gave rise to the creation of murals which constitute the material witnesses, penetrated by the atmosphere of this city and the very personal impressions of the artist. In these wall works with plasticity close to bas-relief, the paper is no longer a support but a paste that serves as glue, binder, and freezes within it a whole variety of recovered objects, fabrics, ‘ingredients, scraps of a very dense city life, found in the streets and in the markets of the city: tangle of used telephone wires and cables saturating the urban landscape of Kathmandu, scraps of sari cloth, banana leaves, mountaineering ropes … Their distribution in the material, tuned to the dyes produced by the artist, forms abstract and joyfully anarchic compositions, giving a large place to texture and color. As an artist, Jessica Stockholder is inspired by the relationships she perceives between colors and objects in her everyday visual environment. Her work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply. Another word sometimes used to describe what Stockholder does is “assemblage,” though that term is also not quite sufficient. Assemblage artists perceive of consumer products, manufactured objects, and industrial materials—the cast-off physical residue of human civilization—as artistic objects in themselves, or as artistic mediums equally valid as paint, stone, or glue. Stockholder utilizes “readymade” articles along with traditional artistic mediums, but not in an attempt to make just an object. Rather, she creates a human experience by formulating three-dimensional pictures in space, which interact in unpredictable ways with the environments they occupy. Whether working on a small scale, such as creating an assemblage that will hang on a wall, or a massive scale, such as creating a sculptural installation that extends from inside a building to the outside, Stockholder explores a larger concern: people’s perception of their visual surroundings, and how that perception relates to feelings of chaos and control. Whether working on a small scale, such as creating an assemblage that will hang on a wall, or a massive scale, such as creating a sculptural installation that extends from inside a building to the outside, she is exploring a larger concern: people’s perception of their visual surroundings, and how that perception relates to feelings of chaos and control.
Photo: Left: Jessica Stockholder, Kathmandu Residency Paper Wall Work 02, 2019, Hand-made Nepali lokta paper, found material, 97,8 x 62,5 x 4,2 cm / 38 1/2 x 24 19/32 x 1 21/32 in, © Jessica Stockholder, courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia. Right: Jessica Stockholder, Kathmandu Residency Paper Wall Work 03, 2019, Hand-made Nepali lokta paper, found material, 97,8 x 62,5 x 4,2 cm / 38 1/2 x 24 19/32 x 1 21/32 in, © Jessica Stockholder, courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 19/6-4/7/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com
