Josephine Halvorson “Unforgotten”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

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Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents the solo exhibition Josephine Halvorson: Unforgotten. This is Halvorson’s sixth solo presentation at the gallery and includes recent paintings made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Josephine Halvorson’s paintings emerge from chance or repeated encounters with objects the artist comes across while wandering and traveling. Her practice often takes place outdoors, naturally relating to daylight, geography, and season. The works in this show center on still life and memento mori, artistic genres that, for Halvorson, “hover between liveliness and decay.” She is drawn to things which have little apparent value—objects and spaces that have been, or may be, forgotten. Sharing the same air and hours with a subject, Halvorson finds within them latent expressions and buried meanings.

Since 2018, Halvorson has been painting with acrylic gouache on absorbent grounds. Inspired by fresco painting’s ability to indelibly hold color and mark, the artist has sought to make a sensitive surface that preserves her observations in real time. Painting in longhand, Halvorson works in a verité style, documenting the subtle shifts of shadow and thought. As she says, “I want to make a painting that remembers better than I can.”

Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, USA) received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work was most recently presented in the solo exhibitions Josephine Halvorson: On the Ground at the Ogunquit Museum of Art, ME (2022) and Contemporary Voices: Josephine Halvorson (2021) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, where she was also the Museum’s first Artist-in-Residence in 2019. Other notable solo exhibitions include the Foster Prize Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); Josephine Halvorson: Measures at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2016); and Josephine Halvorson: Slow Burn, her first museum survey, at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC (2015).

Halvorson has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2021), the US Fulbright (2003-4), and the French Academy in Rome (2014-15), as the first American pensionnaire; in 2009, she was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; ICA Boston, MA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; and Orlando Museum of Art, FL. Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University, and currently lives in Massachusetts.