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18 October – 27 November 2021
Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Stepping Out, a suite of new works by American artist Rebecca Ness. On view from 18 October - 27 November, this marks the artist’s first exhibition in France and with the gallery.
Comprising six large-scale canvases and five works on paper, the luscious blue and green still lifes and portraits in this series evoke the many cycles and rhythms of life, constituting a sort of nonlinear bildungsroman, or narrative of personal growth typically associated in literary terms with the so-called ‘coming of age’ novel. Drawn from the fabric of the artist’s personal life – friends, family, experiences and observations – these works make time material, melding memory, metaphor, and art historical references into one visual lexicon that builds on the artist’s practice of worldmaking through graphic, densely composed, and vividly colored figuration.
For the past few years, well before most of us were confined to our homes, Ness’ works were oriented inwards, depicting intricately detailed interior spaces brimming with a dizzying mise-en-abyme of everyday objects, or tightly cropped, perspectively skewed portraits of the metonymic objects, clothes, and body parts from which identity can be inferred. By comparison, these new paintings, as the exhibition title suggests, register a paradigm shift in the artist’s approach. Painted over the summer of 2021, during a transitional period in the artist’s life and practice, Stepping Out reflects a turning out towards the natural world that is at once vulnerable and expansive.
Dates: 18 October – 27 November 2021
Artist: Rebecca Ness
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Stepping Out denotes a turning point in Ness’ practice. Created over the summer of 2021, which saw her through a difficult period, the paintings reflect an outward shift from her claustrophobic interiors toward nature, as well as the psychological liberation of "walking out the door that you’ve used to hold yourself in."
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Drawn from the fabric of the artist’s personal life – experiences and observations, as well as art historical touchstones – these metaphorical works explore the way an individual piece fits into the whole, evoking the cycles and rhythms of the natural world.
This story is rendered in the artist’s signature visual lexicon of intensely subjective, realistic yet cartoonish, vibrantly colored figuration. Until now, Ness’ paintings have been oriented inwards: depicting dizzyingly detailed domestic spaces brimming with everyday objects, or tightly cropped portraits with skewed vantages of objects, clothes, and limbs.
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Ness excels in monumentalizing the mundane, painstakingly rendering her everyday world and fleeting impressions in oil, a notoriously slow and laborious medium. It’s been said that love is defined by what we pay attention to, and indeed Ness wields her attention like a tool, alongside her paints and brushes, to build her pictures.
As a result, these new paintings teem with affection and gratitude, which is practiced by taking a globalized and granular look at your life while being both in the moment and outside of time.
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Rebecca Ness
A Happy Memory, 2021By contrast, A Happy Memory floats nebulously between past and present. Ness dips into history, borrowing Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe and dubbing it with the landscape of Western Massachusetts where she spent her weekends in college communing in nature with a close friend. Like a star, we meet his gaze across the gulf of many years, crystalized through the high-definition lens of the present in which the artist’s memory was constructed.
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Artist's Inspirations from Van Gogh
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Here we find Ness and her girlfriend, illuminated by an iPhone in the dark of night. They sit up in suspense, contained within their little bubble, peering toward the greater world and its uncomfortable unknowns. Striking the darkest tone among the vibrantly hued works on view, A Rustling (2021) captures the vulnerability and trepidation inherent to the personal growth that characterizes this body of work.
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