BREATHERS
ALISA MARGOLIS
CCA Andratx is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the American artist Alisa Margolis (US, 1975), featuring a series of new works created during her residency at the CCA Studios earlier this year.
Margolis has in recent years established a distinct vocabulary through which to revisit the question of the sublime and epic, but through a decisively idiosyncratic language. Taking up cliché imagery of genre such as Dutch flower paintings, Margolis offers glimpses of worlds simultaneously achieving shape and disintegrating.
In this new body of work prepared especially for CCA Andratx, Margolis explores the terrain between explicit figuration and narrative in a series of small-scale paintings that explore how such a sense of moment or scene takes shape in the mind’s eye.
Motivated by a desire to revisit the Russian lacquer boxes of the artist’s Soviet background, these paintings offer fable-like momentary glimpses, which hint at archetypal forms. The point of departure was the artist’s investigation into female archetypes, but Margolis wanted to depict these symbolic actors at rest, when no longer responsible for embodying concepts.
The space of their de-signification and potential new meaning, new roles, realized through a new series of concentrated articulations, represent a meditation on beauty and gender as explored at the intersection of the symbolic, the decorative and the painting itself as artefact of an event.
Alisa Margolis (US)
Alisa Margolis was born in Kiev, Ukraina, in 1975. She studied at Columbia University, New York (1993-1997), and was the recipient of a Postgraduate Fellowshp at de Aterliers in Amsterdam (2001-2003).
Currently, she lives and works in Berlin, and she was staying in the Studio Azul during March 2017 and January 2019 .
