press release
martha clippinger
sour-sweet
october 28 – december 16, 2023
The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present sour-sweet, an exhibition of recent works by artist Martha Clippinger. This is the artist’s sixth exhibition with the gallery and is accompanied by a catalog with essay by Stephen Westfall.
In sour-sweet, the artist presents her painted wood constructions and handwoven wool tapetes together, revealing varied surface textures and shifts in scale across her practice.
Clippinger’s rhythmic arrangements of colors result from an improvisational and adaptive process. With her painted wood constructions, each object embodies a chance encounter with singular materials. Clippinger embraces the inherent imperfections of the found materials and integrates them into the off-kilter structures of her designs. These irregular geometries inspire two-dimensional designs that are translated into wool by weavers Licha González Ruiz and Agustín Contreras López of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico.
In the exhibition catalog essay, Stephen Westfall states:
Martha Clippinger’s artwork reminds us that geometric art can recapture a childhood sense of endless opportunity in play and rhyme with the decorative genius of cultures beyond the confining brackets of the western canon, particularly the idea of a progressively reductive Modernism.
Clippinger's work is included in public collections such as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and The Columbus Museum, and she has completed large scale installations at Duke University in Durham, NC, the North County Regional Library in Huntersville, NC, and Truist in Charlotte, NC, among others.
In 2024, Clippinger will install two commissioned murals at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, and she will complete her first permanent museum installation at the Columbus Museum in her hometown of Columbus, GA.
Recent solo exhibitions include Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, NY; Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens; Institute 193 in Lexington, KY; Hodges Taylor in Charlotte, NC; The Columbus Museum in Columbus, GA; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, NC.
Clippinger’s work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, Artnews, and Architectural Digest. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a 2018 Arts/Industry at Kohler Co., 2017 Durham Arts Council Grant in Craft, 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, and 2013 Fulbright-Garcia Robles research grant completed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation among others.
She received her BA from Fordham University and her MFA from Rutgers University. Clippinger lives and works in Durham, North Carolina.
The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor and is open Tuesday – Saturday 12-6 pm.
for further information contact miles manning at 212-463-9666.