Marcia Hafif and I would have dinner together over the years, often at her loft. Her space was always serene, meticulously appointed, nothing superfluous, reflecting her current projects and life. Many pictures of Marcia come to mind. In one of them, she is in her  kitchen, the light—Vermeer-like— streaming through the large window, the vegetables, carefully considered and impeccably arranged on a wooden chopping block, a Japanese knife in hand, expertly cutting them just so. Then in one improbably elegant swoop, she drops them into a ceramic bowl—where they fall beautifully. Or watching her make tortillas, or tea or, really, just about anything. Each gesture of her hand as she touched things, lightly, fastidiously, seemed to be a kind of gathering of information, taking possession of them matter-of-factly but also seeming to invent them anew. I imagined that was how she would paint, draw, make her small sculptural forms, her hands deft, steady, unfailing, her movements assured, without wasteful flourishes. She was a singular mix of the sensualist and the ascetic, one who keenly observed the world, its matter and materiality, and thought about it and brought those observations, however filtered and condensed, into her art, into her ideas about art and life, all inextricably intertwined.

Marcia Hafif was born Marcia Jean Woods in Pomona, California on August 15, 1929 and died April 17, 2018 in Laguna Beach, California, aged 88. She is survived by a son, Peter Nitoglia, and his family.

She attended Pomona College, graduating in 1951 and interned at Ferus Gallery for a time, the gallery that put Los Angeles on the contemporary art map. She married Herbert Hafif around then, the marriage dissolving ten years later. Always eager to explore what she wanted to explore, she left for Italy in 1961. Intending to stay for a year, she remained in Rome for eight where she made the paintings that catalyzed a much-respected six-decade career. Returning to California in 1969, she began to work in film, photography and sound, all of which she would incorporate into her production throughout the course of her life. She earned a MFA at the University of California, Irvine in 1971 and soon after, moved to New York, eventually settling into a spacious loft on Mercer Street. During the last few decades of her life she would split her time between New York and her house in Laguna Beach..

Among her  books of published  writings and photographs were Pomona Houses, 1972, and Letters to J-C (author and artist Jean-Charles Massera), 1999. She also made  text-based installations such as the erotically charged musings (some called them pornographic, she said) that she chalked across a blackboard in Rooms, PS 1’s legendary 1976 group show. These were  recently reprised at that institution in a new version.

But she was primarily a painter. The relocation to New York was, in a way, a quest to find a way to paint again after it had been declared dead by many in the art world. In search of that, she made her first pencil on paper drawing on New Year’s Day in 1972, no doubt a symbolic act signifying a new beginning. She covered a moderately large piece of paper with short vertical strokes following each other, from top to bottom. This repetitive marking without expressionistic inflection became the basis of much of her work, including the color experiments that comprised the body of the work which she came to call “The Inventory.” This included the magisterial Extended Gray Scale, 1972-73, a series of 106 small square paintings that consisted of gradations of black to white, the number of canvases representing as many shades as she could differentiate.

In her oft-cited 1978 Artforum essay “Beginning Again,” Hafif determined that the way to do so was to just proceed, a method and point of view that would inform her practice from that time forward, based on a study of color that would make visible the “qualities and attributes of a specific pigment color in a specific medium and format,” she wrote. During that period, from 1974-81, she exhibited with Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Paris, adding to “The Inventory” other series such as Mass Tone Paintings, 1973; Wall Paintings, 1975; Neutral Mix Paintings, 1976; Broken Color Paintings, 1978; and Black Paintings, 1979. It ultimately numbered 26 different sequences, the last the Shade Paintings of 2013–18.

Despite the range of her ventures, Hafif has been most frequently allied with monochrome painters such as Olivier Mosset, Joseph Marioni, Phil Sims, Frederic M. Thursz and Gunter Umberg, appearing in group exhibitions with them here and in Europe, where she has always been better known. Of late, she was the focus of renewed attention. Some recent exhibitions include Marcia Hafif, The Inventory: Painting at Laguna Art Museum, 2015; Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings 1961–69 at Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2016; and Marcia Hafif, The Inventory: Paintings at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2017. A solo exhibition of her work is on view until April 25th at Galerie Rupert Walser, Munich; and upcoming exhibitions in 2018 include: Marcia Hafif: Films (1977–99), Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Marcia Hafif: A Place Apart, Pomona College Museum of Art. She is represented by Fergus McCaffrey.

For “Made in Space,” a 2013 group show at Gavin Brown (curated by Peter Harkawik and Laura Owens originally for Night Gallery), she created a wall text inscribed over an immense yellow rectangle: She wanted to write the text herself was was eventually dissuaded. Unflinchingly direct and even shocking (perhaps because it was conceived by a woman in her 80s), it was a challenging text about a woman’s right to have strong sexual feelings at any age. Her message was clear: desire never abates. Hers certainly never did–not for art, not for life.

The post A Singular Mix of the Sensualist and the Ascetic: Marcia Hafif, 1929 to 2018 appeared first on artcritical.

April 7 to May 14, 2017
221 Madison Street, between Rutgers and Jefferson street
New York City, reginarex.org

If the first impression of this exhibition is that these are standard monochrome painting that would be understandable. The ten works on display, most of which are two by three feet, are dark gray and harbor nothing we’d call images. But give them some time and they take on a very different aspect, as Haynes orchestrates light and dark pigment to form, as the press release stated, an “investigation into the painted illusion of light”. Most of her canvases are demarcated by a left/ right blended fade between various blacks and shades of gray creating a luminous effect. Brush marks inhere at the top and bottom of the canvas, tactile reminders of her painting process that also function as painterly highlights. With Haynes’s emphasis emphatic use of chiaroscuro the paintings evoke dawn and twilight and exude elegiac, romantic atmosphere.

Nancy Haynes emerged as a painter at the beginning of the 1970s. At that time much was made of the “death of painting” but in distinction to that discourse there was, for a number of artists, the conviction that painting—and its historical mode—deeply mattered. It’s hard to imagine that urgency today but abstraction at that time wasn’t so much a stylistic choice as a commitment with the gravitas of political belief or religion. Like older generation painters Robert Ryman and Marcia Hafif, Haynes keeps the faith even as she reworks the orthodoxies of that most severe form of painting—Minimalist monochrome—to her own ends. This show embodied a fascinating tension between Haynes’s half century commitment to the concrete specifics of material and process connoted by monochrome painting and her own interests in metaphor, poetry, philosophy and pictorial abstraction.

While it is possible to view these paintings as pictures of light, Haynes is also deeply interested in intrinsic material qualities of paint. The sides of the panels are often painted in tune with the picture front. Haynes adjusts the matt and gloss of her painting mediums such that the surface reflects more or less light depending on the angle of vision, generating a phenomenological analogue for Haynes’s rendered shading.

And even as one is persuaded that light is being rendered in Haynes’s paintings, the work never reaches the threshold of a convincing illusion of light. Nor is it possible to say if Haynes’s light is of the interior or landscape variety—indeed each painting is so adjusted, that, like the interchangeable image of the duck-rabbit, Haynes’s portrayal of light alternates between atmospheric gloaming and the deflection of light from architectural surfaces. Oddly, rather than making the light seem general or vague with prolonged observation the light in each painting becomes more particular. In final consideration, the light of Haynes paintings is specific only to her paintings.

Through a metaphysical sleight of hand Haynes’s paintings succeed through their ultimate failure to create illusion or to portray. With the collapse of these pictorial conventions it is the paintings themselves that are left to develop a related but independent vision of light. Haynes exploits the insight that paintings are, in essence objects that variously filter, absorb and reflect light. Haynes signifies light in her paintings even as actual light in the room is required to see them. The specific critical term for this recursion of form embedded with its facsimile is Mise-en-abyme. Indeed, one of the paintings in the show bears that title.

For Haynes light is both the dynamic and the matter of painting: abstraction and concreteness. This has been a long running idea for her, as can be seen with her use of glow-in-the-dark pigment in works begun in the early ‘70s. While those luminescent paintings were firmly grounded in the discourse of monochromatic painting of their period, subsequent works advance a very different form of abstraction, one that Haynes constructs through distilling her observations of light. With her latest show Haynes entwines very different conceptions of abstract painting. We can enjoy at one and the same moment her love of brush and oil paint, her personal poetics and a philosophic reverie on the mechanics of light in painting.

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May 5 to July 7, 2012
43 North Second Street
Philadelphia, 215-925-5389

The premise of Marcia Hafif’s fine recent show in Philadelphia has to do with approximating the colors of late Roman frescos—the artist lived in Italy for eight years early on in her career. Her austere monochromes hold the storefront gallery space very effectively; each smallish painting—all of them are hung from the same top level, to maintain a similar visual experience no matter what the viewer’s height—maintains an austerely beautiful presence. The colors, made by Hafif herself, border on the somber and matte, claiming the space before them in a compelling manner. The paintings themselves, dating back to the mid-1990s, are given the series title “Late Roman Paintings,” followed by the materials used to make the picture: permanent red dark, viridian tint, French yellow ochre tint, etc. In some cases, Hafif explains, the colors are lightened by the addition of white pigment, which lightens the color, now described in the checklist as having a “tint.” Hafif, whose reputation is more developed in Europe than America despite her American origins and education, belongs to a generation of monochromatic painters who established themselves in the 1970s and early ‘80s, negotiating a bit of an alliance with the Minimalists but more or less standing on their own.

The ongoing question with monochromatic painting has to do with the contemplation of a deliberately circumscribed object, whose resonance depends as much if not more on the context of available light and space. It is not so much a matter of dismantling color, even though the single unity of hue lends itself to what might be experienced as a constricted expression. That, however, doesn’t hold true for those who experience these accomplished paintings as real efforts to preserve color from the point of view of a purist expression. By historically linking her work to the past, Hafif shows her audience just how effectively contemporary art can connect with aspects of historical painting production. This connection not only concerns the technical media the artist so clearly explains, it also brings back to past to the present, which strikes the audience as a brave thing to do given the ubiquity of art that is neither well made nor interested in art’s history. In some cases, darker-hued paintings are put together, while in others lighter colors are joined. With daylight filling the room from the gallery’s street window, one has the chance to view the works in both natural and artificial light, which represent two very different experiences. Hafif, who is in her mid-80s and who is currently working on her archives, deserves attention for this elegant, accomplished exhibition.

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