Emily Kiacz & Maria Walker

Water, sun, rain wood, canvas, paint grow a painting. - Maria Walker

Cuevas Tilleard Projects is pleased to present Aurora Concreta, a two-person exhibition featuring work by Emily Kiacz and Maria Walker.

For a fleeting moment, the combination of Kiacz and Walker’s work evoke the core ideas of the Arte Concreto Invención and MADI movements initiated in Argentina in the 1940s. These two New York-based artists make us dream about the need for art that actively participates in everyday life, for spontaneous yet rigorous invention. As in Raul Lozza’s shaped canvases and the work of poet/painter Carmelo Arden Quinn, in Kiacz and Walker’s paintings the viewer is pushed to establish an immediate relationship with the concrete realm of things rather than with their fictitious representations or aspirations. Like the artists of Arte Concreto Invención and MADI movements, Kiacz and Walker renew the medium with experimentation and play.

Prioritizing artistic freedom and a physical/material approach to art-making, both Kiacz and Walker use structure as their pliable Trojan horse. The conventional rectangular frame is both the cast and the stage where their narrative develops. Partially breaking from, or perhaps toying with the traditional frame, their playful attitude flows with a sense of painterly experience and knowledge. Translated into sublime color applications of great pictorial luminosity and dynamic shape shifting decor, Kiacz and Walker’s work poetically comes into being.

The idea of autonomy also materializes when looking at their work in conversation with each other. And while listening to them talk, learning about their personal narratives, observing their irregular contours, different textures, and protrusions, one wonders whether these are meant to exist as self-sufficient entities/pictures or as part of a bigger structure. Or to put it differently, what are the limitations of a painting? Is it really a painting’s conventional orthogonality and flatness that keeps it from being autonomous? What role do the artists’ ideas and personal experiences play once the work is taken out their original private context and put on exhibition? Do they still hold any power of their own?

Answers aside, one thing seems to be clear for us while contemplating Kiacz and Walker’s work, conventionality is a relative concept these days.

Emily Kiacz obtained her MFA from Boston University, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute of College of Art. She is the 2016 recipient of the Mayer Foundation Grant. Kiacz’s work has been included in recent shows at Gowanus Ballroom, Sideshow Gallery, and Launchpad all in Brooklyn. She has work in an upcoming exhibition with AlleyOop Projects.

Maria Walker received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, and her BA from Brown University. She attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Walker’s work has been published in the Smithsonian Magazine and reviewed as a Critic’s Pick on Artforum.com, as well as in the Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings, and Beautiful Decay. Her inaugural solo show was at Freight + Volume. She has an upcoming solo show at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY.