New Sculptures by Grace Knowlton
Grace Knowlton is a long-time resident of Palisades, and, as always, she is working on something new. Right now, she is interested in wicker and bones. And sawhorses. These items strike most people as unremarkable; they are some basic elements of every-day life and work, and they are usually overlooked. Grace sees much more. The smallest details in the corner of a bathroom can echo cosmic relationships between light and darkness if the light is right, and if you are thinking like that. She has always been aware of those simple moments— hidden in plain sight—when it is possible to discover a way of feeling by instilling ordinary appearances with profound insights.
Throughout her career, she has explored this enigma in a heterogeneous mix of painting, photography and sculpture. Each idea is the result of intense observation; yet each also emerges from nature so seamlessly that the intensity feels and tastes gentle, cerebral, natural. What do you see when light moves across items crowded together in front of a window, or when a spiraled scrap of rattan slowly uncurls on the table where you dropped it? You can see details, or disorder, or you can lose yourself in an entire macrocosm of form and feeling. In order to make this awareness assume permanent form, Grace shuffles the deck, painting three-dimensional moments onto two-dimensional surfaces, or amplifying two-dimensional ideas into large sculptural shapes. The links among her themes and materials are intuitive: During a trip to Jackson Hole several years ago, she spotted a nice sawhorse in an alley in town. “I found I was infected,” she notes, and an entire series of sawhorse images has followed. “They have so much personality—they’re like animals sometimes, they way they climb up on top of each other, and each one has a story to tell, with paint stains and splinters and nicks, of all the work that has been done on its back.”
Having just returned from another trip to Kenya with her granddaughter, she noted how much she was inspired by the natural forms and processes that she observed there. She particularly loved the light and the foreignness of the landscape. Before the trip, Grace had begun a series of photographs focusing on the shapes of bones; during the trip, she was impressed by the local hyenas, whose efficient teeth and jaws actually crush and eat bones along with everything else that they bolt down during their unspeakable dinners, and she now has some dried hyena scat, whitewashed with bone meal, on a side table in the hallway. The rounded shape and pristine-looking surface were irresistible to her artist’s eye. You can also see the same subtle, but fierce history of hunger, life and death beneath the surface of her photographs of bone fragments.
Examples of her work are in the permanent collections of, among others, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Storm King Art Center, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven, Connecticut. The sawhorse photographs will be on display next summer, starting in May, at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester County. For more information about Grace Knowlton’s work, please contact Lesley-Heller Gallery at 16 East 77th street, ground floor, New York, NY 10075 Tel: 212 410 6120.