Jessica Stockholder. Cardinal Directions

The work of Jessica Stockholder (born in Seattle, United States, 1959 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. Canada) reveals the complex relationship between the illusionistic space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture. Intrigued by the ways things are bounded and how we understand them, she explores this question in relationship to many materials and their intersection with pictorial possibilities. This interstitial state also grounds her work in the overlap between installation and architecture, since it is always linked to the site. Ultimately, her work is about the experience of looking, a kind of abstraction, use of color or artistic experience projected as a way of communicating the world, driven by the artist's conviction that any image of something involves abstraction if we think of it as relating the experience of that thing.

 

Her practice is paradigmatic of what is termed expanded painting, a form of painting that can transform context into content by conquering architectural space and prompting a shift from the traditional two dimensions of the canvas to the three dimensions of real space, as well as including the time spectators take to wander through the space without ever finding a definitive viewpoint. This is definitely painting, and in her works we can talk about figure and ground, chiaroscuro, colour, composition, space, rhythm . . . Everything hints at aspects or concepts of pictorial tradition, even though the materials might be socks, duct tape, a surfboard, a strip of shower curtain, umbrella fabric, a Ghanaian mask, a typewriter, weights or a carpet she has designed following her own colour scheme. It is painting as a reality that can be penetrated, inhabited. Yet it is also painting that lets us continue to talk about painting, even though in many cases the surface to be painted is architectural space. The use of colour dematerialises things and gives painting its pictorial quality, as reflected in this selection of works ranging from 2006 to the present. We notice this in her more intimate pieces, assemblages of usually found and reused objects whose material qualities have been erased by the impact of colour. Artificial light, as a pictorial strategy, also plays into this intention, into this effect of colour. Above and beyond painting, this approach prioritises the pictorial essence of each object and, by extension, the pictorial potential of architectural space, which supports painting as a wall supports a canvas.

 

With all this in mind, we cannot hope to understand her work without embracing one fundamental premise: colour is always ready to assert its dominion over material. Colour plays the role of drawing, perspective, shadow and volume yet also assumes its symbolic potential, its cultural symbolism, because colours change over time and place; Stockholder seeks out this physiological relationship with colour, rooted in emotions and certain traditions that endow colour with various meanings. We see it in Hollow Places Fat; Hollow Places Thin (2011), where the artist screen-prints shapes and colours while making striking cuts into wooden boards to leave a series of hollows. This work represents a break with her usual materials, though it aligns perfectly with her aims, given its character as a "situation" and its condition as a palimpsest of memories, sparked by the intense connections she forged with trees and wood during her childhood in the Pacific Northwest, where she was influenced by the carved totems created by Northwest coast Indigenous peoples. The natural contours and imperfections of the wood are incorporated as "pictorial" memory, just as the wicker baskets take on their colours and textures in Cardinal Directions (2025), a site-specific work created for Es Baluard Museu; here, spectators have to walk around the piece to apprehend it, akin to a periscope reminding us that her work is rooted in a continuous decision-making process. If we want to discover the work, we have to walk. This is also the case in Assist: Tied to be fit - Middle Period (2021), where a rope becomes a vine spreading through the exhibition space. This invasive, accidental or serendipitous quality occurs both in the process of creating the work and in how it is then received, starting from a conceptual order before embracing the unexpected. As a result, her work can sometimes appear surrealist or Dadaist, although it would be inconceivable without the environmental contribution of minimalism. Thus, the very nature of the material and the object transcends any specific details so that what we see-the surface, the painting-evokes many other spaces and sensations with the power to spill over the very limits of the image and the space that contains it.