Elaine Stocki “My Time Ghost”

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

[Image: Elaine Stocki "Gild the Rag" (2021) Watercolor, gouache, and oil on stitched linen; watercolor and gouache on dropcloth, 50 x 43 in.]

This event has ended.

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery presents My Time Ghost, a project space exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Elaine Stocki. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.

Color is the actor and anchor of Elaine Stocki’s paintings. Applied to strips of raw linen or canvas, washes of watercolor and oil seep and bleed onto each other to varying points of saturation. As Stocki describes, these moments of material concentration/condensation are the very “chemical premise/promise” of her work. In Hour Glass, the largest painting in the exhibition, stained orbs of watercolor commingle in their respective halves, the movement of color contained in each hemisphere; an hour glass that has stopped the slippage of time.

The surfaces upon which Stocki paints are often stitched together and stretched on shaped canvases, like an oval or rounded rectangle. These seams are both hidden and exposed, creating areas within the composition that are either hard-edge or frayed. Stocki furthers this effect by building up the edges of her paintings with additional fabric, be it scraps of old paintings or a studio drop cloth, the latter of which cascades around the square edges of Gild the Rag (2021). In two other paintings, Inverted Heart (Lopsided Love) #1 and #2, batting-filled puffers encircle half of each heart-shaped linen, softening an already soft edge, the asymmetry of the ragged heart loaded with meaning. It is in her approach to materials, form and color that Stocki creates an allegorical narrative embedded in each painting.

Elaine Stocki lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds degrees in both Chemistry and Studio Art and an MFA from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Fairfax Dorn Projects, East Hampton, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; Harkawik, Los Angeles, CA; and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, among others. In 2019, her first monograph was published by SKIRA on occasion of a mid-career survey at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, France.

Work by Stocki is included in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).