Clouds, Water
SHIRLEY PETTIBONE
CLOUDS, WATER
Paintings and Sculptures (1965-1970)
Duane Thomas Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition of Shirley Pettibone’s silk screen works titled: “Clouds, Water.” The works, mostly made between 1965 and 1967, were previously shown at the California State College Museum in the Fall of 1966 and have not been exhibited since. The exhibition will open on March 15th, 2024, in Tribeca, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm.
Shirley Pettibone (1936-2011) was a seminal artist of the American conceptual art movement. Many women working in a conceptual vein during this period found it difficult to showcase their work. Nonetheless, many persisted despite the bias, and a new generation of women, including Pettibone, heralded a wave of deconstruction.
For this exhibition, Duane Thomas Gallery presents some of Pettibone’s early works using silkscreens, a technology she adopted and experimented with in collaboration with her then-husband, Richard Pettibone, throughout the sixties. These works, made from photographs of clouds and water, are very restrained, evoking the repetitive music of John Cage and the muted colors of Agnes Martin. Gradually evolving from faded pinks, lavenders, and dusty blues.
Concerned from an early point in her career by environmental issues, Pettibone collected images of skylines and bodies of water, which she sometimes cropped and collaged in her diaries (also shown in the exhibition). The collages clearly reflect a sense of concern and a deep yearning for nature.Also included in our exhibition is a selection of the artist’s “Cloth Objects,” made between 1968 and 1970, which the gallery presented at Art Basel Miami last December.Made from muslin that the artist dyed with thinned acrylics on the floor of her studio, they were sometimes sewn and turned onto themselves to become sculptures that she filled with pillow stuffing. The pieces were both revolutionary and highly synthetic in their approach to painting and sculpture. Neither truly one nor the other, they articulate, with a high degree of clarity, the elements of the crafts, decompose them, and reorganize them into an object that feels highly familiar yet definitively foreign.The years between 1965 and 1970 seemed particularly important and prevalent in the creation of works for both women artists worldwide and for Pettibone, who saw the political revolution taking place as an opportunity to create her most refined and mature work to date. The silkscreen works and the Cloth Objects are a definitive expression of the artist’s relentless need to push the boundaries of her craft and are important creations within the scope of the American Conceptual Art movement.For more information, contact: [email protected]
DUANE THOMAS GALLERY 137 West Broadway #3 New York, NY 10013Instagram: @duanethomasgallery
