Jessica Stockholder

Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition by Jessica Stockholder, the 2007 winner of the museum’s Lucelia Artist Award acknowledging her extensive and ongoing achievement as both an artist and teacher, and celebrates her profound impact on generations of artists worldwide.

Drawing on the readymade stuff of material culture, Stockholder transforms simple utilitarian objects into discrete sculptures and immersive environments that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation.

Stockholder’s rigorously formal abstract sculptures engage the viewer in a physical and perceptual encounter, which is at once highly evocative, yet resolutely unsentimental. Stockholder’s careful calibration of color is also crucial and distinctive element of her work. Not only does it call attention to the vivid palette of commonplace things, but also reflects and enlivens our experience of the world.

Since the 1980s, Stockholder has created abstract and complex works that combine aspects of painting and sculpture. She assembles everyday objects—couch cushions, plastic container lids, shoe laces, construction materials, fake fur, lamps, electrical cord, plastic stacking crates, pillows, papier-mâché, balls—adding brightly colored areas of paint that blend with the vivid plastics used in many mass-produced consumer products. Stockholder maintains control over the formal elements of her work which keeps the incredible variety of materials from overwhelming the viewer. Both Stockholder’s studio works, which refer to her permanent free-standing sculptures, and her site-specific temporary installations engage with and transform the spaces they occupy.

Stockholder’s sculptures and installations have been shown widely at museum and galleries in the United States and in Europe.