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레베카 네스: 타래30 August – 24 September 2022
Presented by Marguo · Hosted by EDIT
52, Hoenamu-ro 44-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea
서울시 용산구 회나무로 44 길 52Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Threads, a solo presentation of recent works by American artist Rebecca Ness in Seoul, Korea during the week of the first edition of Frieze Seoul. Hosted by Korean gallery EDIT and on view through 24 September, this pop-up exhibition marks the artist’s first exhibition in Asia.
Almost exactly one year after her first solo exhibition Stepping Out with Marguo, Ness considers her new exhibition as a kind of cheshbon hanefesh, or ‘taking inventory of the soul’, a practice that the artist relates to her Jewish upbringing. Regarding her show in Seoul as an account of the past year, the artist engages the viewer by drawing them into the intertwined fabric of her creative life.Comprising three large-scale oils on linen and three small gouaches on paper, the exhibition is titled Threads as, in the words of the artist, each work of the show gives ‘little clues to how narratives are all connected’. By embedding discarded sketches and paintings that match other paintings in the show, Ness reveals in Summer studio (2022) how she looks back at her works and how she ‘sees’ herself as an artist.
Artist: Rebecca Ness
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Ness worked simultaneously on all three oil paintings, as the ideas came to her all at once. The centerpiece of the show, Summer studio (2022), serves as a time capsule that catalogs different aspects of Ness’ creative process in her studio, depicting her artist-self in a very upfront, almost naked, and extremely vulnerable way.
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Rebecca Ness
Summer studio, 2022
I really needed to make a vulnerable portrait of me in my studio. That was the first thought. Then that thought went to me just being vulnerable in my life, which is when all these other paintings came in one fell swoop. — Rebecca Ness -
For Ness, the vulnerability and the idea of ‘regeneration of self’ is the overarching narrative that threads together all the works presented. The idea that summer is the time of rejuvenation becomes even more central in Rest (2022), where the artist plays on the idea of ambiguity, as she paints the bird in a flux of death and sleep.
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Rebecca Ness
Rest, 2022Oil on linen
198 x 305 cm (78 x 120 in) -
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Best understood as a ‘romantic historian’, Ness excels in transcribing her imagined world and monumentalizing the mundane. Recurring elements like the bird, the self-portrait and the intimate scenes take and pull from each other like threads, which is why it’s essential for the artist to preserve the interconnectedness in her works.
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Rebecca Ness
Evergreen, 2022Oil on linen
177.8 x 228.6 cm (70 x 90 in) -
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I can’t finish one painting without the other. That’s always been how I work.
— Rebecca Ness
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Sketches and other paintings for the exhibition are rendered painstakingly in Summer studio (2022) where the artist examines her artistic philosophy and her works by cross-referencing the different tangents and narratives within narratives. The result is a dynamism that verges on cartoonish and is soaked with vitality, just like everything that Ness sets her eyes and hands on, as an artist and as a storyteller.
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Rebecca Ness
Group undress, 2022Gouache and colored pencil on paper
76.2 x 57.1 cm (30 x 22.5 in)
85.3 cm x 66.3 cm (framed) -
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The duality of the concept of Threads reconciles Ness’ relationship with time and space. Behind the strata of experiences and collapsed time recorded by the space of the canvas, Ness pumps life into the narratives by going constantly in and out of different pictorial spaces and connects all the temporalities.
She thinks of her works as theatrical plays that unite time, space, and characters. Her studio, as the physical and mental space where she threads together scenes and emotions, allows her to take inventory of her past relationships and experiences and to step out of herself, to paint herself in an aspirational way of what she thinks she's working towards. -
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Photo © Frenel Morris
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