THE RED TIE PAINTINGS
Lyles & King
Friday, November 17, 2017
6-8PM
106 Forsyth Street at Broome
New York NY 10002
Mira Schor, Bleeding Eye, 2017. Oil and ink on gesso on linen, 16×20 inches.
parents refugees from Hitler, thrived in US, father died 2 mos after Eichmann trial #diedofEichmann #delayedholocaustvictim #inheritedtrauma*
Late 1990s, walking to the Met, feeling good about my life, suddenly think, it won’t happen here #spoketoosoon*
A day in the studio begins with the instantaneity of response to that day’s repellent news, which I can articulate very freely in ink and gouache on paper. The paintings fix and develop some of these moments, enact a scenario, concentrate the rage into as intense a frame as possible. Their surface is a viscous slurry of black oil paint. The blackness is not just spiritual and political darkness, it also represents the way in which, in such a moment, space itself is solid and fights you as you try to move forward, impinges on your freedom. At the same time the glossy enamel-like surface feels oddly joyful. The protagonists of these scenes are a red tie whose power to invade, attack, and ensnare is confronted by a female avenger, a sorceress, whose cunt is an all-seeing and also bleeding eye. Her familiar is The Owl of Minerva, whose wisdom cannot help because it too has been ensnared by the web of the red tie. The paintings operate like a species of ex-voto, though without religion involved: there is no Virgin Mary to thank for a miraculous recovery that has not yet come, just the memorialization of a specific sense of daily political outrage, which, for a split second, heals my self.
*Tweets written for the J20 Speak-Out at the Whitney Museum of American Art, January 20, 2017
Mira’ show will run from November 17, 2017—January 7, 2018.
More info about the show here.
Mira Schor’s work from The Red Tie Paintings have been chosen as the featured work in the current issue of the poetry and visual art publication La Vague Journal, issue 9, “Provocations.”
Mira Schor is honored to be elected to the National Academy–a unique museum and educational institution with a collection of historic and contemporary American art by Academicians from its founding in 1825 to today–and to be part of a very distinguished group of 2017 Academicians, including Harmony Hammond, Theaster Gates, Teresita Fernández, and Marilyn Minter. A ceremony and reception will be held in honor of the new Academicians at the National Academy in New York City on November 16, 2017.
More info about the National Academy is available here.
Mira Schor is a New York-based painter with deep roots and engagement–as artist, writer, educator, and activist–with feminism and with art history, particularly the practice of painting in a post-medium culture. Schor’s paintings operate at the intersection of political and theoretical concerns and formalist and material passions. The central theme in recent paintings is the experience of living in a dangerous moment of radical inequality, austerity, accelerated time, and incipient fascism, set against the powerful pull of older notions of time, craft, and visual pleasure. Schor was educated at New York University and received her MFA from CalArts where she was a member of the CalArts Feminist Art Program and a participant in the historic feminist art installation Womanhouse. Schor has been the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and an AICA-USA award for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the author of two books of collected essays, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life. She is also co-editor of the journalM/E/A/N/I/N/G and editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov. She is Associate Teaching Professor at Parsons Fine Arts.
See more of Mira’s work here.
