Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce our fifth exhibition with Michelle Stuart opening July 24th and running through September 18th, 2021. 

Since the 1970s, Michelle Stuart has been internationallyrecognizedfor arich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimatedrawings, paintings, sculpture and photographs,all centered on alifelong interest in the natural world andthe cosmos. A pioneer in the useof nontraditional media, Stuart brings forth imagery by using organic andsite-specific materials in unique ways that expand the notion of what artand painting can be.

In this exhibition of paintings from 1985 to 1990, entitled An Archaeology of Place, the artist merges science, botany and the collection of organic specimens with a practice that is painterly yet remains deeply connected to the sites from which they are derived. Specimens collected from treks in locations such as Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Arizona are embedded in encaustic and pigment and arranged in modular grid-like patterns that recall the minimalist compositions of artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol Le Witt. As Stuart has noted, “I find great satisfaction in the rigorous structure of the grid, but I like the organic on the grid so that there’s a combination of structure and chaos”. Often, these all over compositions evoke images of galaxies or the night sky, another fascination of the artist. Stuart’s encaustic grid paintings reference the physical and the metaphysical, collapsing time, place, and memory while remaining anchored in their own materiality.

A selection of drawings from 1969 to 1974 informs the paintings by providing a foundation for the development of her process.

Stuart described the genesis of the encaustic grids as follows:

“In my research, I discovered that ancient civilizations used a fusion of beeswax and pigments in paintings and reliefs. They also embedded other materials in the mixture. The term "encaustic", referring to heated beeswax, is derived from the Greek encaustikos. Beeswax is a natural vehicle for painting, older than oil paint, and was used in Egyptian Fayoum painting on wood panels. Today, the Fayoum paintings remain as fresh as they were in the first century BC & AD.”

“I began using my own natural beeswax, dry pigments, and dammar resin in the early 1980's.l melted the wax and introduced earth for color and plants from specific places. If it was a site near the sea or early Native American middens, then shells and perhaps artifacts like small shards might appear. What I embedded depended on the site. I called it an “Archaeology of Place”. I wanted it to serve as a record of that place, a preserved record, evidence, either prehistoric, historic or contemporary, of the physical site and place. A palimpsest of Time, Place and Memory.” Stuart’s practice will be the subject of the upcoming feature-length documentary, Michelle Stuart: Voyager, which reflects the grand themes found in her work–an intense celebration of nature, a revelation of perception, a path to a deeper memory and a profound understanding of ourselves within the cosmos.

Born in Los Angeles, Michelle Stuart lives and works in New York and California. Individual museum shows include: Place and Time, Walker ArtCenter, Minneapolis; Michelle Stuart, Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, N.Y, and Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature, which originated in 2013 at the Djanogly Art Center, Nottingham, UK and traveled to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, accompanied by a catalogue published by Hatje Cantz. Her work has also been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporaines de Bordeaux, France; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and many other major museums and galleries worldwide. Stuart’s work was also presented in Viva Arte Viva!, curated by Christine Macel at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.