Elaine Reichek: Frock-Conscious

JUNE 10th - JULY 22nd 2023

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce Frock-Conscious, Elaine Reichek’s 5th solo exhibition with the gallery. Frock-Conscious will be on view from June 10 through July 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 10 from 2:00–5:00 PM.

Frock-Conscious explores the relationship between textiles and painting through nearly 50 works produced over the past 5 years. Although the exhibition is primarily grounded in Reichek’s signature medium of embroidery, it also expands spatially to restage the studio itself as a blended site of artistic production, domestic life, intergenerational conversation, and critical investigation.

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In the large gallery is a salon-style installation of 24 embroideries, featuring images of clothing or textiles that Reichek has appropriated from a wide assortment of paintings, drawings, and designs. Collectively these art-historical sources — ranging from Michelangelo to Kerry James Marshall — read like an associative mini-survey of the artistic pleasures and challenges in rendering costume, drapery, and pattern. Whether full-bodied or a tight crop, each image has been re-created entirely in thread, by either digital or hand-sewing techniques. Reichek thus engineers a cyclical translation of depicted fabric back into actual material, as well as a conceptual inversion of the distinctions between the fine arts and craft.

Reichek’s investigation of the semiotic repertoire of fabric also examines its function as a second skin, whether through haptic textures or with an embroidered text that conjures the erotics of touch. Coding is another through-line, as she compares darning patterns to Sol LeWitt’s systems- work seriality.

The largest works in the exhibition, JP Textile/Text 1 and 2, reimagine Jackson Pollock’s legacy as a collision of metaphors and materials. Each unfurls a considerable length (12 and 17 feet, respectively) of fabric commercially printed in 2 colorways with a pseudo-Pollock pattern — Spatter, by Kravet Inc. — over which Reichek has digitally sewn 25 citations selected from Pollock’s critical bibliography. Each citation is embroidered in a distinct typeface and appears randomly at least 3 times in each work, as Reichek cheekily literalizes the idioms “an embroidered reputation” and “art by the yard.”

Rounding out this associative exploration of the repressed connections between Pollock and the decorative is a triptych of 3 silk charmeuse scarves that reproduce Cecil Beaton’s 1951 photoshoot, for Vogue, of models in couture gowns posing against Pollock’s drip paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery.

The small gallery space stages a conversational installation devoted to Henri Matisse and the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry. Although Matisse profoundly influenced the Bloomsbury artists, their entrepreneurial efforts actually anticipated his own forays into commercial decoration and textiles by nearly two decades. Along the right as one enters, 4 embroideries reflect on the Bloomsbury artists’ sustained engagement with fabrics and patterns, both in their paintings and through their short-lived but influential design business, Omega Workshops. Reichek also displays 2 dresses sewn from Omega fabrics (now marketed by The Charleston Trust) featuring painterly patterning by Bell and Grant. Both dresses are made in a modern high-waisted, corset-free style, for which Bell herself was widely known within her social milieu. To each is pinned an embroidered remembrance of Bell’s fashion sensibility from her daughter, Angelica, and her granddaughter Henrietta, respectively.

In a similar spirit of cross-pollination, Un petit salon après Matisse is a staged mashup of current-day commercial product adapted from Matisse’s work, intermixed with vintage items that evoke his extensive and eclectic personal collection of textiles and furniture. A double-sided green-velvet folding screen, entitled Screen Time with Matisse, serves as a kind of Warburgian atlas of printed archival images, assorted fabric swatches, and miscellaneous merch. And in another related mode of deconstruction, Scattered “Sheaf” with Felt and Fabric reimagines Matisse’s 1953 ceramic tile mural The Sheaf as fabric cut-outs pinned around a tricolor, imitation-block-print floral pattern.

As Reichek brings each new round of conceptual and material repartee back to her own artistic production, she reveals herself as both subject and object, maker and viewer, fan and critic, engaged in an ever-renewing reflective dialogue.

Elaine Reichek (b. 1943) lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, with solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; the Tel Aviv Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Jewish Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Dallas Museum of Art; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, among others. Reichek’s work was included in Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in 2022; Venedigsche Sterne at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland, in 2022; Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, in 2015; Art/Histories at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in 2014; the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; and the 2012 Whitney Biennial.