BMG First Look presents: Katherine Mangiardi: Paintings of Lace
January 17 to February 9, 2013
37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 593 3757
In terms of artistic medium, Katherine Mangiardi is a polyglot equally at ease, expressively and conceptually, in the languages of painting, assemblage, photography and installation. One thing she is not, however, for all the exquisite and penetrating acuity of her perceptual gaze, is a photorealist. It therefore comes as a surprise that the recent (2008) RISD/Skowhegan graduate enjoys her New York debut solo spot at Bernarducci Meisel, a gallery hitherto (and everywhere else in its sprawling showroom) fixated upon the hyper mimetic. Mangiardi’s focus in this current show is lace, exploring that wondrous material in myriad historic, aesthetic and social complexities. She “sews” her own (in fact, cuts out, paints and reconfigures) in plaster and canvas; she hides her visage behind imagined identities of anonymous workers of the material in a Cindy Sherman meets Yinka Shonibare-worthy photographic masquerade; and she deconstructs the decorative syntax of lace – its curlicuing back and forth between complexity and restraint, upfrontness and veiling – in an eerily elegiac, painterly tour de force that somehow manages, in the process of fastidious rendering, to also seem like action painting.
Katherine Mangiardi at Bernarducci Meisel was an ARTCRITICAL PICK in February 2013
