Heather Gwen Martin by Miles McEnery Gallery

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

WALKING THE TIGHTROPE: THE ART OF HEATHER GWEN MARTIN By Christian Viveros-Fauné

Abstract painting is an absorbing way to tell a story. Some of these stories can be told quickly, but the best require repeated looking. Another way to consider abstract paintings is to compare painting to a tightrope walk. Every decision is a calculated step along the rope; if you have the slightest slipup, you break your neck. For more than a decade, Los Angeles-based artist Heather Gwen Martin has been creating paintings that walk a tightrope between spontaneity and self-consciousness, improvisation and deliberation, dissolution and structure. Her latest batch—some seventeen canvases she made for her first New York solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery—constitutes a sparkling collection of eye-and-mind-bending yarns. A master of calligraphic line and color contrasts, her Joan Miróon-a-wing compositions suggest painting plotlines that are as old as Methuselah; look again, and the same canvases connect to our current reality of backlit screens and computational algorithms. Born in 1977 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin studied at the University of California, San Diego, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At UCSD, her teacher was Kim McConnell, a pioneer of the Pattern and Decoration movement who spearheaded that generational mash-up of high-end abstraction with demotic kitsch. An early mentor of Martin’s, McConnell has praised her sense of flat space, which he claims “opens up almost three dimensionally and in ways that skew balance, proportionality, and composition.”1 For a hint of what that might actually look like, think Alexander Calder mobiles zipping across Skittle-colored seas.

1. Lauren Buscemi, “Heather Gwen Martin,” Art Ltd. magazine, September 2010. http://www.visualartsource.com/index. php?page=editorial&pcID=22&aID=528

Yet McConnell’s most important influence on his student was likely his own unruly example. By exposing abstract painting to the real world in the late 1970s and early ’80s, he enlivened a genre that was stuck parroting a moribund academic version of Abstract Expressionism. Twenty years later, McConnell witnessed certain real-life influences break into Martin’s youthful paintings. Among these were the effects of Pacific Coast air and light, Southern California’s legendary obsession with high polish (think car hoods and surfboards), and Silicon Valley’s culture of computer interfaces.

While a full-time student at art school, Martin worked as a colorist for DC Comics, adding color to scenes and characters using computer technology. The experience had a profound if unintended effect on her painting. Today, it’s hard to look at her crisp, controlled brushwork and highly saturated color palette without recalling their connection to billion dollar properties like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. (DC Comics films make, on average, $224 million per release.) Not infrequently, Martin’s canvases resemble the splash pages for these copyrighted entertainments— emptied of spectacle and with their production values inverted. Denuded of figures, captions, and word balloons, her alternately moody and sprightly landscapes distill reflection and sensation into loops of sinuous line and flat areas of color. In a 2010 interview, Martin acknowledged the effect technology has had on her work and, by extension, other painters of her generation: “[It] has affected the way that my hand, eye, and brain work because I spent a lot of time at a computer with my hand making shapes and color. . . it’s not real color—it’s the color on the computer, instant and artificial with clean lines precise down to the pixel.”2 But one would be wrong to think that Martin has subsequently endeavored to keep up with the latest, flash-on-the-screen effects of electronic media. Instead, hers is a case of adopting the slow practice of painting to turn the breakneck values of digital speed and high-tech distraction on their head. In time, she has learned to tweak and manipulate an epochal 2. Lauren Buscemi, “Heather Gwen Martin.”

failing she herself identified as immanent in the culture: “[We] conform to technology as opposed to technology conforming to us.”3 In accepting the challenge to have technology conform to her own non-instrumentalized purposes, Martin has mobilized one of the planet’s most ancient analog technologies—painting—to hijack and enhance the look of our digital world. As a result, her canvases speak the lingua franca of computer-aided visuals but encourage mindfulness. If her paintings superficially resemble the livelier aspects of swipe-and-like looking—smoothly rounded shapes and abrupt transitions between bright areas of color—they remain embedded deep in the present moment, like the taste of underripe fruit or a sharp intake of cold breath. Martin begins her process by priming her linen canvases with an oil wash and a thin coat of paint, allowing the rough texture of the fabric to shine through. This process gives Martin’s paintings their uniform fields, where it’s nearly impossible to disguise wayward brushstrokes. To these, she adds coiling lines and sinuous forms, creating a sense of three-dimensionality that breaks with the hard-edged flatness with which she has been associated. At times, Martin’s forms take shape from concrete references—specific landscapes, natural contours or body parts she conceives of as “moving in and out of space.”4 At other times, they emerge from her imagination, articulated as hedges against gravity both within and beyond the arena of the canvas. Martin’s vividly colored abstractions are 100 percent handmade—containing no high-tech aides or digital fillers—but they also vigorously channel a controlled fluidity. Translation: The artist’s hand transcribes the painting’s energy and force directly onto the canvas. Martin, in fact, has spoken about her painterly process as an endurance test, wherein touch, strength, and control push against the limits of the physical. She has also confessed to consistently retracing her supple lines to arrive at the proper degree of roundness. The tangibility of these efforts places the 3. Lauren Buscemi, “Heather Gwen Martin.” 4. Heather Gwen Martin, interview with the author, July 31, 2019.

California artist’s work at an important remove from that of her more analytic predecessors, like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. The opposite of hard-edged abstraction—the late 1950s style that emphasized the impersonal arrangement of clean lines and contrasting hues—Martin’s approach to paint application proves to be as distinctive as her signature. Gestural and calligraphic to the point of being lyrical, Martin’s canvases achieve smooth surface planes, open fields of color, and a general economy of means through the use of a line that is so vigorous as to be decidedly expressive. At times, her paintings look like oil-on-canvas records of various moments after the big bang—with clouds of primordial elements jockeying to become planets and stars. In the artist’s own words, her characteristic compositions strive to look “calm yet tense.”5 Unsurprisingly, Martin uses a second phrase to describe her particular take on painting: walking a tightrope. 6

In point of fact, balance and weightlessness turn out to be prominent traits of all of Martin’s new paintings regardless of scale. Where smaller works like Deep Focus (2019) and Second Glance (2019) contain modest masses of biomorphic fluidity levitating against fields of contrasting color, paintings like the 9-foot-wide Energy Loop (2019) deliver on a panoramic view of similarly variable elements. In the latter painting, yellow-orange and wine-colored balloon shapes are trailed—or snarled—by tapered lines of various hues. Set aloft in a blue-black ether, Martin’s forms suggest both poise and suspended movement. As an abstract ensemble, they resemble figures in a Greek frieze engaged in either an intergalactic battle or a cosmic pas de deux. To paraphrase Arshile Gorky, these and other works by Martin constitute living organisms floating in vivid color. Despite the fact that they resemble everything from naturally occurring patterns to the body’s internal organs and certain biological shapes, the artist’s repetitive use of bulbous and kidney-like protrusions make up a substantial portion of her reduced vocabulary of forms. The 5. Heather Gwen Martin, interview with the author. 6. Henry Moore, Henry Moore: Writings And Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002) p. 195.

other part belongs to Martin’s energetic line. Done freehand, with substantial muscle and no taping, it snakes itself in and around the other elements that inhabit Martin’s canvases like an overactive and chromatically varied umbilical cord. Consider, for instance, the paintings Venom (2019) and Six to One (2019). Though Martin admits to titling after the fact (when the painting is completed), the former canvas wears its name like a birthright. Set floating in a sea of pine green, the picture features chartreuse protuberances as well as fang-like ribbons of varied thickness in white, coral, mint, and pink. Six to One, for its part, presents a much brighter palette, dominated by areas of coral and tan. Ghosted by Martin’s characteristic swellings, this canvas, like Venom, advances via several of the artist’s signature strategies, particularly, her familiar color choreography and her dramatic shifts of scale. Without her shape-shifting streamers, none would achieve final resolution—such is the degree to which Martin’s use of line ties together both her floating shapes and vast swells of flowing space. No wonder the sculptor Henry Moore, in 1937, referred to the phenomenon of biomorphic abstraction as containing “universal natural shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.”6 But Martin’s oeuvre is not just chock-full of these elements; they constitute the very self-referential forms the artist marshals to relay her most compelling tales. Beyond their natural allusiveness or pareidolia—the tendency people have to see sheep in clouds and vice versa—Martin’s canvases consistently enact vital dramas. Teetering between abstraction and figuration, they walk the tightrope between two of art’s most transformative points: the process of making a painting and the invention of an image.

Christian Viveros-Fauné is Curator-at-Large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. He has curated numerous museum exhibitions around the world and is the author of several books. His most recent, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, was published by David Zwirner Books in 2018.

Second Glance, 2019

Oil on linen 20 x 21 1/2 inches 50.8 x 54.6 cm

Deep Focus, 2019 Oil on linen 20 x 21 1/2 inches 50.8 x 54.6 cm

Songbird, 2019 Oil on linen 20 x 21 1/2 inches 50.8 x 54.6 cm

Two by Two, 2019

Oil on linen 20 x 21 1/2 inches 50.8 x 54.6 cm

Tremor, 2019 Oil on linen 35 x 37 1/2 inches 88.9 x 95.3 cm

Six to One, 2019 Oil on linen 35 x 37 1/2 inches 88.9 x 95.3 cm

Venom, 2019 Oil on linen 35 x 37 1/2 inches 88.9 x 95.3 cm

Left Dimension, 2019

Oil on linen 60 x 56 inches 152.4 x 142.2 cm

Peppered, 2019 Oil on linen 60 x 56 inches 152.4 x 142.2 cm

Transmission, 2019

Oil on linen 82 1/2 x 77 inches 209.6 x 195.6 cm

Rhythm Voices, 2019

Oil on linen 82 1/2 x 77 inches 209.6 x 195.6 cm

Flash Point, 2019

Oil on linen 82 1/2 x 77 inches 209.6 x 195.6 cm

Stinger, 2019 Oil on linen 30 x 54 3/4 inches 76.2 x 139.1 cm

Cypher, 2019

Oil on linen 30 x 54 3/4 inches 76.2 x 139.1 cm

Spines, 2019

Oil on linen 30 x 54 3/4 inches 76.2 x 139.1 cm

Freefall, 2019

Oil on linen 30 x 54 3/4 inches 76.2 x 139.1 cm

Energy Loop, 2019

Oil on linen 60 x 109 1/2 inches 152.4 x 278.1 cm

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN Born in Saskatoon, Canada in 1977 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2008 “Transpositional,” Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA 2005 “Paintings,” Lombardo Studios Gallery, Culver City, CA

EDUCATION GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2001 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1999 BA, University of California, San Diego, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “Currents,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2016 “Heather Gwen Martin,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Landing,” Murals of La Jolla, La Jolla, CA 2014 “Rogue Wave Projects: Heather Gwen Martin,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2013 “Pattern Math,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 2010 “Recreational Systems,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Santa Monica, CA

2018 “Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century,” (curated by Mark Scala), Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (traveled to Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA) “The Agency of Art,” University Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA “Intersecting at the Edge, Karl Benjamin, Heather Gwen Martin, Eric Zammitt,” Claremont Museum of Art, Claremont, CA “Evolver,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Shaping Color,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2017 “On the Road: American Abstraction,” David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI “California Connections: Selections From the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego,” (curated by Anthony Graham), California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA 2016 “How Many Miles to Babylon: Recent Paintings from Los Angeles and New York,” C24 Gallery, New York, NY “Atmospheric Abstraction,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Touch,” (curated by Edward Goldman), El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo, CA 2015 “Younger Than George,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “View from the Edge of the Soul,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA “NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today,” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

2014 “Object Object!!,” Helmuth Projects, San Diego, CA “MAS Attack 6,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2013 “Rogue Wave 2013,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Theatrical Dynamics,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “MAS Attack,” LA Mart, Los Angeles, CA

2004 “OMA Regional 3,” Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA 2003 “Understood,” Cassius King Gallery, San Diego, CA “Emergent Stages,” Lyceum, San Diego, CA 2001 “Exhibitions and Time Arts Events,” Gallery II, Chicago, IL

2012 “The Very Large Array: San Diego/Tijuana Artists in the MCA Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA “Painting on Edge II,” d.e.n. contemporary, Los Angeles, CA

2000 “Project Cathedral,” San Diego, CA

2011 “Lucky 13,” MKG Art Management, Houston, TX “Welcome to Anywhere: Southern California Abstraction,” Southwestern College Art Gallery, Chula Vista, CA

SELECT COLLECTIONS Equinor Art Collection, Houston, TX Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO

2010 “Here Not There: San Diego Art Now,” (curated by Lucía Sanromán), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA “Seven Person Show,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Santa Monica, CA “New Contemporaries III,” Project X Art, Solana Beach, CA 2009 “Social Climbing: On the Move,” Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA “Homing In,” Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA 2008 “Transpositional,” Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA 2005 “Bare Walls,” Gallery II, Chicago, IL Galleria Ninapi, Ravenna, Italy “Paintings,” Lombardo Studios Gallery, Culver City, CA

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN 14 November – 21 December 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved  Essay © 2019 Christian Viveros-Fauné Photography by Jeff McLane, Los Angeles, CA Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-21-2 Cover: Energy Loop, (detail), 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery would like to thank Elizabeth East and everyone at L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.