Kasmin is delighted to announce a new exhibition of work by American painter Jane Freilicher (1924–2014). Parts of a World will go on view at 297 Tenth Avenue from January 21–February 27, 2021, comprising some 15 still lifes spanning the artist’s career from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Together, these works illuminate Freilicher’s interior world, tracing her steadfast attention to the intimate domestic subjects that characterize her scenes—flowers, drapery, and New York backdrops—rendered in the artist’s distinctive style of painterly representation. This is the second solo exhibition at Kasmin since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2017, and the first ever to focus on the artist’s still lifes.
Freilicher’s light-swept canvases are instantly recognizable for their framing of everyday objects within the context of the order, or casual disorder, of the artist’s studios in lower Manhattan and Long Island. Often situating the viewer at the threshold of the inside and outside, her scenes are derived from reality but painted into a fiction.
The subjects recurring most often in these works of Freilicher’s are flowers. Stems and blooms in works such as Coleus and Verbena (1973) and Goldenrod and Landscape (1967) reach upwards to the tip of the picture plane and sometimes almost beyond it. Reflecting on Freilicher’s work, her contemporary Alex Katz remarked, “Flowers are much harder than faces, and much harder than landscapes [...] There are very few people who can paint flowers that well.” Unconcerned by traditional associations between femininity and florals, Freilicher painted instead in the same spirit and dedication as Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse—a subtle and unrelenting observation of domestic life.
The exhibition further demonstrates the variance and fluency of Freilicher’s mark-making, from tight brushstrokes to a looseness that suggests its subject by collapsing distance or combining multiple perspectives. Lending its title to the exhibition, Parts of a World (1987) renders a vaporous downtown skyline bathed in diaphanous peach above a tablecloth, ghost-like, that holds objects of remarkable solidity. An early work, The Painting Table (1954) takes us into the evening under fluorescent lighting, which nevertheless allows the dissolving of the object into one pale corner. Later, Untitled (c. 2005) piles plates upon wide, gestural washes of deep blue and yellow. John Ashbery, a close friend of Freilicher’s, articulated this phenomenon: “Her pictures always have an air of just coming into being, of tentativeness that is the lifeblood of art.”
At a time when many are more sensitively attuned to their indoor spaces and the aesthetic pleasure they provide, Freilicher’s commitment to, and belief in, the formal richness of these quotidian domiciliary views engenders a lesson in close looking. The artist’s freely improvised compositions incorporate the inventive reorganization of the same objects over the course of more than 50 years—a cast of characters of which she never tires. Whether it is the warmth of draped fabric sitting under a floral arrangement, a collection of ceramic bowls and plates, plastic nursery pots, or a casual lunch of bread and fruit, the confidence and optimism of Freilicher’s brush convinces us to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
