At The Galleries
The Hudson Review
Karen Wilkin
July 24, 2022
I’ve been a fan of Claire Seidl’s deceptively forthright paintings and her mysterious photographs for years, so I was delighted that, late winter and spring, a broad view of her achievement was offered by exhibitions of paintings at David Richard Gallery, in Harlem, and paintings, monoprints, and photographs at 1GAP Gallery, in Brooklyn. Seidl’s work is clear, straightforward, and complex. At first, her paintings seem to be declarations of the basic requirements of picture-making—making marks and creating a surface. While loosely restating the vertical and horizontal givens of the canvas, Seidl invents a great range of touches and gestures, never disguising the necessary act of transferring paint to the canvas but instead making the results of that act into distinctive carriers of expression. Variations in the rhythm, scale, speed, and weight of her marks—fluid, abrupt, aggressive—combined with equally rich variations in color—delicate pastels, astringent saturations, moody monochromes—along with the shifting densities of the visual fabric of her pictures, all conspire to suggest not only different kinds of space and light, but also different moods and emotional temperatures. While there’s a strong family resemblance among Seidl’s works in all media, each is a stubborn individual.
Her unequivocally abstract, deliberately uningratiating paintings manage to suggest the instability of the natural world. Perhaps this is because of her parallel practice as a photographer, a relationship underscored by 1GAP Gallery’s showing the full range of her work in different disciplines. Seidl’s photographs, whether of the outdoors or of interiors, seem to question the nature of seeing. She records (with low light and long exposures) unremarkable things that we might otherwise ignore: corners of rooms, recently vacated dining tables, ragged shrubbery, the edges of woods. Her images are so elusive that we question our perceptions, while we enjoy the subtle orchestration of tones and soft-edged shapes; the half-glimpsed, blurred figures and twining branches; the pale silhouettes; and the suggestions of things we can’t quite recognize, both man-made and natural. Something similar obtains in Seidl’s paintings despite their abstractness: a sense of immanence, of the ungraspable, presented in assured, declarative terms. It’s what keeps us looking.
Associated Artist
Associated Exhibitions
- Claire Seidl Violets are Blue
UPTOWN LOCATION
March 23, 2022 - April 22, 2022
MORE INFO
Associated News
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August 27, 2022
CLAIRE SEIDL
Maine Museum of Photographic Arts
August 25, 2022
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July 24, 2022
At The Galleries
The Hudson Review
Karen Wilkin
July 24, 2022
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April 9, 2022
Claire Seidl: Unbounded in time
Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Tom McGlynn
April 9, 2022
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March 22, 2022
Claire Seidl: Violets are Blue
Galleries Now
March 22, 2022
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March 20, 2022
Press Release - Claire Seidl Violets are Blue