Danziger Projects, in association with the Paul Kasmin Gallery, is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper by Elliott Puckette. This will be the artist's first exhibition with Danziger Projects and her first New York exhibition in four years.
Elliott Puckette was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York City. She began exhibiting in New York in 1989, and since then her work has been regularly exhibited in America and around the world.
For more than a decade and with great consistency, Puckette has practiced her own distinctive form of abstraction, producing paintings and works on paper that appeal to both the mind and the eye. Her work is at once formal and non-objective. Beginning with a history of looking at script, Puckette creates a calligraphic line that engages questions of direction, form, color, and boundary. Bringing to mind a musical score, or a skater's trace, the journey each line takes is always unique. Asked how she knew how long a line should be or where it should go, Puckette answered "I know when to stop when I have answered the question, has the line done what it is supposed to have done?"
While in Puckette's paintings the line is literally carved out of fields of colored ground with a razor blade, in the works on paper the deductive process is reversed. Starting with a blank piece of handmade paper, Puckette begins with what she describes as "a few gestures". A composition is then carefully and painstakingly developed. Finally, the line (or sometimes lines) is meticulously painted in colored ink, waxing and waning as it journeys around the paper. While the artist may take into account the nature of each piece of paper, the finished works are impressive feats of decisiveness. (As the writer Daisy Garnett remarked, Puckette's lines may be ambiguous but they are never random!)
The finished works hint at deeper meaning in the manner of music or poetry. They are unapologetic in their relationship to beauty while utterly distinctive in their authorship. Indeed one of Puckette's many achievements has been to infiltrate abstraction from a uniquely original direction. Like Pollack's drips and Marden's loops, the linear swoops and arabesques of Puckette's work are a visual language all her own.
Elliott Puckette's works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The New York Public Library and the Fogg Art Museum in Boston.
For more information please contact the gallery at 212 629 6778 or at: info@danzigerprojects.com