NYAB Event - Josephine Halvorson “Facings”

Josephine Halvorson “Facings”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

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Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Facings, an exhibition of new work by Josephine Halvorson on view from January 23 to March 1, 2014.

Halvorson makes paintings on-site, face to face with an object in its environment. Often no more than an arm’s length away, she detects variations in texture, light, and temperature, transcribing these perceptions through the medium of paint. Each work that results shares a natural likeness with the object, yet bares its own countenance.

In the past, Halvorson has traveled far afield, making paintings on the road, seeking intimacy from happenstance. For this new body of work she stays local, concentrating on the immediate surroundings of her studio and home in western Massachusetts – the foundation of a new structure, a woodshed, and heat from a fire.

With extended attention over the course of daylight hours, latent histories are expressed and unexpected understandings of the everyday emerge. Traces of human activity, composition of material, and evidence of energy surface in the paintings. As Halvorson looks hard at the routinely overlooked, she finds liveliness in stillness and the unforeseen in the seen.

Facings is Josephine Halvorson’s third solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. following her 2008 debut solo show, Josephine Halvorson, and What Looks Back in 2011. Other solo exhibitions include Side By Side at Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris (2012) and Clockwise From Window at Monya Rowe, New York (2009).

Recently, Halvorson published an essay, Shame: The One That Got Away, in the Winter 2012 issue of ArtJournal. She also curated the group exhibition I Am The Magic Hand (2013) at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Additionally, in conjunction with a course she taught at Princeton University, Halvorson made a series of paintings at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, several of which were exhibited at Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University in St Louis in the group show L’Hourloupe (2013) curated by David Rhoads.

Halvorson’s work will be included in the upcoming 2014 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is one of the subjects of the online video documentary series, New York Close Up, produced by Art21, and is currently working on a series of prints at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. This summer Halvorson will be in residence at Moly-Sabata, Sablons, France. A solo exhibition curated by Dorothée Deyries-Henry will follow at Angle Art Contemporain.

Halvorson holds a BFA from The Cooper Union (2003) and a MFA from Columbia University (2007). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna (2003-4), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2009), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award (2010). She teaches painting in the MFA program at Yale University.

[Image: Josephine Halvorson “Woodshed (Door)” (2013) Oil on canvas, 70 x 35 in. 177.8 x 88.9 cm]