Reverb

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Reverb, a group exhibition featuring new work by Zipora Fried, Arturo Herrera, Sheila Hicks, and Erin Shirreff. Reverb is on view December 10, 2022, through January 28, 2023. 

Utilizing a diverse variety of mediums and materials—including textile, collage, works on paper, and sculpture—each artist approaches the visual languages of modernism through distinct modes of reexamination and reinterpretation. Placing their work in dialogue with one another prompts new synergies amongst the formal and conceptual qualities of their work, while speaking to their continued interaction with larger modernist art historical lineages.

Zipora Fried’s large-scale colored-pencil works are meticulously composed of individual strokes, each a distinct, self-contained gesture by the artist’s hand. Reflecting Fried’s interest in the physicality of artistic labor, each imprint of pencil to surface imbues the drawing with active, vital energy. Line and color are fundamental; they are articulated in their purest elemental form yet rendered inextricable from the greater compositional landscape. All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt-green) is from a series of monumental works on paper, measuring over twenty-five feet in length and presented as a hanging installation. Draping swathes of oscillating pigment extend the drawing beyond the two-dimensional frame, prompting new relations of space and transforming the phenomenological experience of color into the realms of the sculptural and architectural.

Arturo Herrera explores modernist strategies of fragmentation, re-composition, and repetition in colorful wall paintings and multi-media collages. He often integrates found material and sourced pop culture references in his work, weaving these visual signifiers within a network of paint, texture, and color. Complicating the legibility of this once-familiar iconography, Herrera provokes a generative tension between the image perceived and what remains obscured. In his glass “drawings,” a singular abstract shape, tinted in solid colors of red, green, yellow, or blue, appears suspended against a clear landscape. This gestural mark evokes the active brushstrokes of paint, and a capacity for movement in the constant refraction of light. As in Herrera’s collages, what can and cannot be perceived remains ambiguous: the translucent quality of the glass pane captures what or whomever stands in front or behind it, blurring and framing it as its own distinct, abstracted image.

Sheila Hicks’ boundary-crossing practice spans modernist movements and artistic lineages across the world. Her multidisciplinary perspective began developing during her early travels through Latin America in the late 1950s, exploring the region’s rich craft traditions and photographing important archaeological sites. After living and working in Mexico for five years, she then established her studio in Paris. When Morocco’s Ministry of Culture invited her to visit the country in the 1970s, the nature of modernity itself was being widely discussed; it was her collaboration with Moroccan artisans that further evolved her practice beyond any binaric distinctions between the traditional and the avant-garde. The fundamental idea of an artwork, and the transformative potential of its medium, is what remains paramount to Hicks. Color and scale become vital channels of communication, engendering complex tactile associations and emotive responses. This translation of formal quality to psychical effect manifests across compositions of varying size and spatial engagement, from the interlaced reflections of her intimate minimes, to the gravitational windings and undulating lineaments that compose her large-scale bas-reliefs. Synthesizing art, architecture, craft, and anthropology, Hicks’ practice resists categorization, refracting the visual legacies of modernism through her relentless exploration of material expression. 

Erin Shirreff’s work investigates the shifting distances between an object and its representations, and the effect of this mutability on one’s experience of an artwork. Her large-scale dye sublimations reproduce imagery from modern and contemporary art anthologies onto sheets of aluminum, which are then cut and arranged into dimensional, collage-like compositions. Magnified past legibility, these fragmented reproductions evoke surfaces of bronze, steel, glass, and resin, emphasizing their materiality independent of a physical medium. Fields of half-tone dots and flinty hatching are veiled by vibrant slices of color, coalescing into what is perceived as a singular, composite structure. Maquette (double curve) is from a series of works similarly inspired by documentation of mid-century abstract sculpture, and the translation of object from digital screen to embodied space. Shirreff uses foamcore and glue to improvise composite sculptures, constructed from a sequence of thin angled planes and curves. The one-to-one, sand-casting process carries the tactile qualities of Shirreff’s studio materials; striking details such as dents, seams, and surface textures are retained in the bronze cast, a trace presence of the original construction persevering through an overlay of rich, black patina.