Almine Rech Paris is pleased to announce A Moving Window, Heather Day's first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from March 2 to April 20, 2024.
Heather Day makes large-scale abstract canvases dappled with the transmuting shades of the natural world. Far from literal evocations of the infinitely mutable atmospheric conditions that she observes at dawn and dusk in her high desert studio, Day’s works take apart and reassemble the medium in order to obliquely but evocatively depict the passing of time and the shifting of seasons. Titled A Moving Window, this exhibition explores the artist’s immersion in the quotidian yet profound environmental changes that happen every day outside her window. This presentation includes a new group of works from Day’s “Scattering Light” series, first begun in 2022, that examines the ways in which light is refracted through cloud formations. The artist probes the myriad ways that elevation and wavelength impact how this light is received by the human eye. With her saturated, pooling hues of deep red, blue, and orange, the artist interrogates how color and light leave an emotional residue, how sensory perception is intimately entwined with memory and affect.
Working in the legacy of abstract expressionist Color Field painting, Day starts by pouring acrylic over the surface, allowing the pigment to wash and puddle. As she adds different colors, the tints spread and interact with each other, spurring alchemical interactions that are shaped by humidity and the hour of the day. Utilizing supports that far exceed her own height, the artist performatively engages her compositions, continually moving and shifting the canvas, which acts as a stage for not only basins of paint, but the outsized brush marks that sweep briskly across negative space. In some stretches, Day’s stains rest thinly on the canvas, the texture of dyed fabric. In other sections, multiple layers of coloring result in thick heaps. The tension between these consistencies propels the eye around the frame, as do the final chunky dashes and scrapes of paint that dot the surface.
After completing the application of paint, Day cuts the works into long columns or vectors that she will reassemble and sew into entirely new compositions. In Magenta Window, six long vertical bays are sutured side by side, giving the piece a flickering, animated quality. Swoops of magenta are brusquely chopped, their edges butting up against hazy pools of cobalt blue and cadmium orange. The union of each strip laid side by side creates tension and energy between the recorded gestures. Day deconstructs the supposedly unimpeachable canvas surface, breaking up expected painterly tropes, and rejoining them in polyphonic connections.
Included here for the first time are three paintings that introduce a new radial composition in Day’s body of cut works. Vertically oriented, the configurations resemble the layout of a clock, with triangular sections extending from a central point. In Turning Sky, sections of fuchsia, cerulean blue, deep purples, and cranberry red all meet at the center of the canvas. At the upper right, a polygon of light blue rimmed by red and purple flanks another panel that features a darker spattering of crimson with an undulating boundary that reveals a section of blank space. Emphasizing the three-dimensional presence of the pieces, the painted field wraps around the sides of the stretcher bars. Day’s immersive and vivid paintings explore what the artist describes as “the dynamic relationship between the tangible and the abstract.” They offer the viewer a challenging, thought-provoking space in which to survey the affective, resonant, and transporting qualities of form and color.
— Ashton Cooper, curator, writer and art historian
