Jessica Stockholder
January 31 - August 24, 2025 | Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain
Curated by David Barro and Soad Houman, Cardinal Directions features works loaned from Barrié Foundation’s International Contemporary Painting Collection along with a site-specific work created for Es Baluard Museu. The work of Jessica Stockholder (born in Seattle, United States, 1959 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. Canada) reveals the complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture. Intrigued by the ways things are bounded and how we understand them, she explores this question in relationship to many materials and their intersection with pictorial possibilities. This interstitial state also grounds her work in the overlap between installation and architecture, since it is always linked to the site. Ultimately, her work is about the experience of looking, a kind of abstraction, use of color or artistic experience projected as a way of communicating the world, driven by the artist's conviction that any image of something involves abstraction if we think of it as relating the experience of that thing.
Her practice is paradigmatic of what is termed expanded painting, a form of painting that can transform context into content by conquering architectural space and prompting a shift from the traditional two dimensions of the canvas to the three dimensions of real space, as well as including the time spectators take to wander through the space without ever finding a definitive viewpoint. This is definitely painting, and in her works we can talk about figure and ground, chiaroscuro, color, composition, space, rhythm . . . Everything hints at aspects or concepts of pictorial tradition, even though the materials might be socks, duct tape, a surfboard, a strip of shower curtain, umbrella fabric, a Ghanaian mask, a typewriter, weights or a carpet she has designed following her own color scheme. It is painting as a reality that can be penetrated, inhabited. Yet it is also painting that lets us continue to talk about painting, even though in many cases the surface to be painted is architectural space. The use of color dematerialises things and gives painting its pictorial quality, as reflected in this selection of works ranging from 2006 to the present. We notice this in her more intimate pieces, assemblages of usually found and reused objects whose material qualities have been erased by the impact of color. Artificial light, as a pictorial strategy, also plays into this intention, into this effect of color. Above and beyond painting, this approach prioritizes the pictorial essence of each object and, by extension, the pictorial potential of architectural space, which supports painting as a wall supports a canvas.