ROSALIND TALLMADGE

Nebula, 2017

mica, glitter, glass beads, oil, powdered graphite + silver pigment on silk

72 x 60 inches

sold

The tactility and complexity of Tallmadge’s all-over, multimedia surfaces dissolve into an atmospheric sublime. Suggesting infinite states of mind and feeling, a viewing of one of Tallmadge’s sprawling works can be like plunging into a cloud, or being taken in by an exploding star. It is abstraction aestheticized and it is transcendent and romantic.

Tallmadge expands the vocabulary of painting while simultaneously subverting it. Her paintings engage the history of Formalism – most notably the point-of-view of color field painting – and the politics of beauty and surface. Utilizing materials such as mica, silver leaf and glitter, Tallmadge sets a dialogue between external sources in urban and natural environments with a more internal process of making. The smaller-scale works read as artifacts of a geological time. At once speaking to something earthly – recalling processes of growth and decay – they are also completely otherworldly, lending an exquisite duality.