Shirley KANEDA - Space Without Space

Press release

Galerie Richard is honored to announce the inauguration of Shirley Kaneda’s third solo exhibition “Space Without Space – Drawings” to be held simultaneously in our Paris and New York gallery from April 26 to May 28, 2014. Kaneda has continuously explored the possibilities of abstract painting with the intention of provoking ways of juxtaposing a wide variety of painting modes which opens up a diversity of possibilities for interpretation. She has constantly tried to change the terms of abstract painting by questioning and challenging the exclusionary practices that lead to the entropic collapse of modernism.

The title of the exhibition; Space Without Space refers to spaces that can be imagined but are virtually present. Shirley Kaneda presents eight new works on paper, using acrylic and gouache as mediums. In these works we find elements of the abstract style that she has developed since the year 2000, namely her undulatory, fluid and complex outline whose sinuous appearance is reminiscent of reflections on a liquid surface. By using a liquid medium, Kaneda manages to reinforce the impression of fluidity that her paintings suggest. These forms seem unstable and floating. The colors change as the eyes follow the wave, but this is a moving composition with fluid and colorful shapes, frozen in the moment.

Shirley Kaneda juxtaposes her undulating style with abrupt shapes and colors. The fluidity of the watery patterns is contrasted by the angular outlines and pure colors. She uses them in the squares, circles and lines of her works. These geometric elements seem static unlike the previously described wave patterns. The inspiration for these works can be seen in previous works from her last exhibition in Paris such as Thunderous Silence in 2009. Shirley Kaneda skilfully uses these curvilinear patterns and biomorphic forms in order to create confusion and maintain a space of shift where the location and relationships between these elements appear to be variable and interchangeable resulting in an unstable space where there is no “last” space or ground.

In the catalog text that Shirley Kaneda wrote for After the Fall, Aspects of Abstract Painting since 1970 edited by Lilly Wei, she states: “The painter no longer has to subscribe to the imagery of the ‘whole’ as a truth or universal law. The “immediacy” that Greenberg coined and defined as a way to experience this phenomenological and philosophical aspect of abstract painting can now be reinterpreted to present a different reality about our current thoughts about how we perceive, and we reflect on ourselves. What we can take into account is how the notion of time and space have changed and the fact that abstract painting is not a negation of representation. »

If abstract painting is not a negation of representation, how and what does it represent? These are questions that Shirley Kaneda poses to the viewer through her paintings that show us a more complex reading of the painting of time and space in the technological age. The playful composition in his work is constructed in such a way that it allows the viewer to imagine an indeterminate space that is not fixed, which can provide insights into how our lives and the world are based on contradictions and paradoxes; and that there is no one way to order our understanding. This approach has been central to Shirley Kaneda’s work for more than two decades. As such, his interest lies in revising and reclaiming abstract painting, inserting it not into the avant-garde, but into a viable and thoughtful practice.

Shirley Kaneda has received numerous awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Visual Art, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. His work is present in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Philip Morris USA, and Sprint International Corporation among many others.