May 18 - June 22, 2024
From Barry Whistler Gallery:
“Lorraine Tady is an artist living and working in Dallas, represented by Barry Whistler Gallery since 1994. Her first
solo exhibition with the gallery was in 1999 and most recent group exhibitions and publications include On Screen/Off Screen: Contemporary Painting and Technology, Barry Whistler Gallery; Texas Women: A
New History of Abstract Art, San Antonio Museum of Art; The Adjacent Possible, Muscarelle Museum of Art,
Williamsburg, VA; and MULTILAYER Vision 20/20, Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Germany.
“…Tady is teasing at the types of representation quoting diagrammatic illustration, complicating representation
where the referenced schematics are a codification of the world, making that which is intangible, visible, within
the paintings the schematics become objects which are neither purely formal nor carriers of their original
meaning. Even so, they are representational. As our eyes read across the surface of the paintings, we linger on
those moments that feel familiar, untangling them from the unknown. However, devoid of their context, any
specific form defiantly remains ambiguous.”
“The human condition isto look for pattern and familiarity. We extrapolate from what we see to whatsomething
is by means of our past experiences. We make certain mental leaps and are quick to take shortcuts. Seeing is,
at least in part, an act of the imagination. Looking at these paintings we are made aware of being complicit in
the work. We are enacting Duchamp’s edict: “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting.” But for Tady, it feels that
this process is being extended, the spectator is made to undertake a re-drawing, a mental tracing of the lines.
There is a closer parity between the painter and the viewer, than that which Duchamp suggests. Lorraine talks
eloquently of the wrestling of drawing into painting. A process that loops back on itself, directly implicates the
viewer and that reveals its hidden structure.
The field of color in which this mark-making occurs in Tady’s paintings is mostly undelineated. Colors fade
together and burst through one another. It is as though we are given a view into another cosmos, a universe
governed by conditional interactions of which we know nothing. Yet moments exist within the paintings which
assert them as the products of stratified invention. There are instances and passages in the work that glitch–an
unexpected hard line will cause the termination of an otherwise organic form. This calls back to the forms and
mechanisms of looking, and is a declaration of artifice and detachment. Further to this, often there is a slight
acknowledgement of the edge of the painting: an expanse of color will terminate just before the end of the
canvas. This creates framing within the painting and affirms the singularity of the painting.
This solo exhibition by Lorraine Tady will represent her new body of work, mostly consisting of 7 large scale
canvases which have incorporated elements from her monotypes, drawings, and smaller canvases. In Gavin
Morrison’s essay we can understand the perception game of Lorraine’s compositional elements:
Additional information and images available upon request.
Tady’s constructed universe is familiar and alien. Yet the work as a whole retains a consistency that is
accentuated by the utilization of a variety of mediums which converge together. Elements in her drawings,
paintings, digital images, and printmaking are of course similar, but Tady also allows herself to directly
trade, copy, quote elements between the works. Passages which occur in her monotypes are scaled and
modified into the paintings. The potential for these lines to be facts, descriptions or representations speaks
to a painting always being both artifice and fact.”
Reception: May 18, 2024 | 5–7 pm
315 Cole Street, #120
Dallas, 75207 TX
(214) 939-0242
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