Jessica Stockholder

born 1959 in Seattle, USA

lives and works in Chicago

Ode to O

OpeningO – A share of oxygenOh, Web of threads togetherOh no! So tightly ties. Odious.Ohhh. Same old, same old, same old, place people, groundOh say can you see….Oh Canada, our home and native landOh. Hole through whole round worldOkOver

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Jessica Stockholder

read inGerman

Jessica Stockholder studied painting at the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C., Canada, and received an MFA from Yale University. In 2010 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Art and Design, Vancouver. Up until 2010, Stockholder worked as a director and professor of graduate studies in sculpture at Yale University. She is currently the faculty chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She has received many awards and grants, including the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Anonymous Was A Woman award.

Jessica Stockholder has been creating abstract and complex three-dimensional pictures that combine a broad variety of everyday objects since the 1980s. Her work is born out of artistic traditions like Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Pop Art, and ready-mades and has continued to contribute to the dialogue between painting, sculpture, and installation. Located between the poles of pictorial effect and three-dimensional presence, her works lend meaning to the space they occupy.

Stockholder selects the objects she uses based on their material and color qualities. With the trained eye of a painter, she collects buckets, flooring material, fake furs, lamps, doors, and Lego pieces and assembles these with colored ropes or chains before creating a coherent appearance through acrylic and wall paint. The end result represents a complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture – between painted reality and the reality of painting.

Although the objects remind us of their use in everyday life and hence our own subjective experience, Stockholder’s works are intensely formal and abstract and are therefore free from symbolic or narrative meaning. Rather, they represent a clash of different types of perception; they question our sense of reality, which we understand with the help of abstractions and systems of order.

In 1997, Stockholder participated in the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Whitney Biennial in 2004. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, The Netherlands (2019), the Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, Vigo, Spain (2012); Musée d’Art moderne de St. Etienne, France (2012); Palacio de Cristal, Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2010); Madison Square Park, New York City (2009); PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island (2006); Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark (2005); Blaffer Art Gallery, University of Houston, Texas (2004); Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2003); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2003); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2000); Dia Center for the Arts, New York City (1995); Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (1993), and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1991).

Her works can be found in such museum collections as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, Centraal Museum Utrecht, The Netherlands, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée Picasso d'Antibes, France, MUMOK, Vienna, Austria, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The British Museum, London, United Kingdom, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York, and Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, California.

Selected Works

Jessica Stockholder

Squeezed Orange Actor Stack: Ode to Liz Larner, 2021

wooden furniture parts, MDF, paint, solid steel and steel tubing, hardware and found round steel parts

254 x 150 x 50 cm (100 x 59 x 20 in.)

6 Zoom Views

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Jessica Stockholder

Between the Lines, 2017

speaker wire, copper wire, green floral wire, rope, yellow nylon webbing, camouflage nylon webbing, pink nylon webbing, vacuum cleaner parts, metal rod, copper clamps, two hooks, two exercise equipment handles, 12 sushi plates, pull chain, plastic parts, hardware, tree trunk section, electrical tape, deflated beach ball, iPad stand parts, hard drive part, tree branch, copper pipe, plexiglass wine rack, yarn, 3 1/4 inch nails, acrylic paint, Lexel as primer on the white handle of vacuum cleaner

350 x 550 x 109 cm (138 x 216 x 43 in.)

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