Mira Schor
Death Is A Conceptual Artist
March 18 – April 24, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, March 18, 6-8pm
Lyles & King Gallery is very pleased to announce Mira Schor’s solo exhibition Death Is A Conceptual Artist. This will be Schor’s first New York solo show since 2012.
In two series of new paintings and drawings, with her characteristic mix of delicacy, toughness, and satirical acuity, Mira Schor explores a creative life that embraces political activism, critical research, and painterly richness, drawing upon both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Schor has never agreed to throw the baby out with the bath water in her life-long commitment to painting and drawing, to feminism, and to a life of the mind. She has written, “I will not give up the critical and intellectual or the visual and intuitive, so I see that the task ahead is to continue to insist that both ways of being as an artist can and even must exist in the same works and in the same practice. So, like Persephone, I do live in two worlds.”
In creating these new works, Schor has drawn upon her admiration of the work of Ida Applebroog, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, and James Ensor, and pays homage to the Mangaaka carved wood figures from the Kongo recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which posed a transformative challenge to the scale of the figure in her work.
In the works included in Death Is A Conceptual Artist, Schor confronts mortality in the face of historical ambition and depicts the painter as a transformative link between nature, the body, and language. Schor’s masterful large-scale new drawings are self-portraits of the Woman Artist–who is, in terms of art world fads, both “too young” and “not dead enough.” These uncompromising, darkly funny and confrontational female “Power” Figures –half naked, half young, half dead, fielding questions and demands from the world and from ghosts presences of youthful alter-egos–are nevertheless painted and drawn on fragile tracing paper, creating a contradictory message about power and meaning in relation to feminist identity, female embodiment, and links between image, materiality, and language in a manner that is emblematic of her art practice going back to the 1970s.
Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in New York City, The Hammer Museum, P.S.1, the Neuberger Museum, and the Aldrich Museum. Interviews with Schor have appeared onArt21Blog, Bomblog, Hyperallergic, Artinfo and Culture Catch. She participated in ARTspace’s Annual Distinguished Artists’ Interviews at the 2013 Annual College Art Association Conference in New York. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997; both Duke University Press), and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and recent writings have appeared inArtforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism, and the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design.
Lyles & King
106 Forsyth St. at Broome
New York, New York 10002
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12-6
www.lylesandking.com
