Elaine Reichek

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Elaine Reichek’s second solo exhibition Glossed in Translation. Reichek is well known for her conceptually and art-historically informed embroideries, which in the past she has always made by hand. Her latest exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “Glossed in Translation,” combines six of these visually sumptuous works with a new venture: a group of embroideries made on a computer-programmed sewing machine. Modeled after the pinked-edged fabric swatches used widely in the textile industry, these works reproduce paintings by well-known modern and contemporary artists such as Henri Matisse, Bridget Riley, Andy Warhol, and others as densely stitched emblems of uniform size and shape. This body of work both immediately indexes the earlier artworks and transforms them into something richly new, returning them to fabric-based traditions of pattern and design to which they are indebted and at the same time updating them with a hyper-modern form of production.

The exhibition also contains a translucent, environmentally scaled machine-embroidered curtain and six thematically linked handmade embroideries involving both images and writing. Most of these latter works again adapt art-historical sources, which here range from Poussin and Zurbaran to Lawrence Weiner and Gerhard Richter. Although they are made painstakingly by hand, these works too involve digital technology, since Reichek uses a computer process to develop the embroidery patterns that she then follows. Paradoxically, the artist also sees the smooth, continuous surface of the sewing-machine works as resembling that of painting, while the hand embroideries are closer to the computer monitor in constituting images out of countless pixel-like units. Indeed the principles and practices of making images are a concern throughout “Glossed in Translation,” and the ambiguities of those processes are reflected in the exhibition’s underlying themes: in both the choices of image and the way those images are treated, each piece involves double meanings, codes, alternate possibilities of both reading and constituting pictures. Through juxtaposition, allusion, and reference, Reichek explores and exploits the ways in which meaning is constructed both visually and in language.

Elaine Reichek lives and works in New York. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, OH, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium, and Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel.

Pressetext

Elaine Reichek
Glossed in Translation