NYAB Event - Linda Francis "We Can Build You"

Linda Francis "We Can Build You"

Minus Space

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MINUS SPACE announces the exhibition Linda Francis: We Can Build You. This is the New York-based artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of new large-scale oil paintings on wooden panel.

Over the past forty years, Linda Francis has been fascinated by the limits of human knowledge and has referenced concepts from fields, such as astronomy, physics, mathematics, and philosophy in her work. Her paintings and drawings investigate the relational aspect of form, possibility as a variable of viewpoint, and the paradox of appearances that combine the physiological and the geometric.

Regarding the source material for her new body of work, which merges painting, digital, and printing processes, Linda states, "I'm working with images from the skin of one of the Space Shuttles that failed in the 1990s. Microscopic scale. It's from the heat shield that broke down. At the time, a friend of mine was working with NASA on fixing that problem. He was doing the electron microscopy of the skin of the heat shield. And he sent me this little Xerox, and said you know, I saw this, and I thought of your work...It is the surface of something metallic. It's a crystal formation. But at the same time, it looks like a biological membrane with points on it. In architecture the outer cladding of a building is called a 'skin'. And I keep thinking that any skin might look like that. So I play with it, and I do things like take the skin and I overlay it with itself a few times. I get different interference patterns."

She continues, "So I make this new suite of works, very simply organized, overlaid once, then twice, three times. And it looks three different ways. And the funny thing about it is when you blow it up - this is what's so great about painting - when you make it into an image or when it's big enough, it becomes something that looks like it's from a microscope on the one hand, but on the other hand, it becomes materially real. So you think of it as body-like, or relating to the self. And the reason you do, I think, is because the things we make are the things we are. So the things that work naturally, the organizations that work naturally, the way we see things, the way things function, are all related."

An in-depth interview with Linda Francis by artist and writer Benjamin La Rocco appears in the current February issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Linda Francis (b. 1943 in Bronx, NY) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She has mounted solo exhibitions at MINUS SPACE, MoMA PS1, Nicholas Davies Gallery, Condeso Lawler Gallery, Damon Brandt Gallery, Hal Bromm Gallery (all NYC), William Paterson University (NJ), University of Alabama (AL), New Arts Program (PA), Galerie Ghislain Mollet-Vieville et J.P. Najar (Paris, France), and Gallery Per Sten (Copenhagen, Denmark).

In 2012, Linda was included in the group exhibitions Neither Here Nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere at the gallery and MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Other recent group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allegra LaViola Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery (all NYC), and Non-Objectif Sud (Tulette, France).

Linda is the recipient of awards from The Terra Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Hunter College. Her work has been written about by critics including Yve-Alain Bois, Ken Johnson, Tiffany Bell, Carter Ratcliff, David Shapiro, Michael Brennan, and Ben La Rocco, among others, in publications such as Flash Art, Arts, Artforum, Art Press, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Artnet Magazine, Art in America, Artcritical, and The New York Times.

Her work is included in the collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, University of Alabama, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Nordjyullands Kunstmuseum, Rogalund Kunstmuseum, Schlumberger Collection, Equitable Collection, and Philip Morris Collection.