Elliott Puckette
Past exhibition
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Kasmin is delighted to present a major exhibition of work by Elliott Puckette (b. 1967) at 509 West 27th Street from January 13–February 26, 2022. The exhibition debuts the artist's sculpture alongside several new large-scale paintings and a suite of works on paper. Together, they represent a significant development in Puckette’s dedicated explorations into the nature and limits of linear abstraction. This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at Kasmin, preceding the publication of her first major monograph in Spring 2022.
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The elegant simplicity of Puckette’s line belies its complex process. With brisk, confident gestures, the artist etches pirouetting inlets into board washed with layers of gesso and ink. The colored washes create distinctive atmospheres in each work—brooding storm clouds of gray and tumultuous seas of dark purple. Puckette uses a razor blade to draw her arcs, carving out pathways instinctively with exquisite light touch. Later, she returns to deepen the furrows with cross-hatching—a labor-intensive process that inherently slows the line, subtracting it from the painting and delineating its negative space.
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In recent bodies of work, Puckette has developed her use of line by first rendering it three dimensions, making ephemeral sculptures out of wire. By translating the form of the maquette, Puckette flattens, and thus further abstracts, the line. As such, the works capture a silhouette of their three-dimensional references, a fleeting snapshot of perspective.
For the first time, this exhibition presents both large and medium scale sculpture by the artist, inviting further immersion into the language, form, and logic of the line. Cast in bronze, the largest of these works spans nearly 16 feet in length. -
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Puckette’s lines meander their terrain with no premeditated structure, recalling the tenets of Tachisme, the intuitive form of expression favored by European painters in the 1940s and 50s. At the artist’s Brooklyn studio, photocopied works spanning the annals of art history are arranged on one wall; an esoteric puzzle of visual references. While the artist is typically reticent to explicate her works, the blooming skies of John Constable and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo nod to a Romantic or sublime sensibility that is integral to Puckette’s own work. Elsewhere, etchings by Albrecht Dürer allude to the virtues of addition by means of subtraction mirrored in her practice.
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View of Elliott Puckette's Studio. Photograph by Diego Flores
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Works
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Publications
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The Kasmin Review
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About the Artist
Portrait by Charlie Rubin. -
Explore
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Judith Bernstein: Public Fears
January 6 – February 15, 2025 509 West 27th Street, New YorkJudith Bernstein’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, Public Fears, will survey nearly 60 years of work—from 1966 to the present—underscoring the enduring urgency of Bernstein’s trailblazing artistry. Including new paintings, works on paper, and a restaging of her iconic Signature Piece (1986), this will be Bernstein’s first New York solo exhibition since the acquisition of her major charcoal screw drawing Horizontal (1973) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. The exhibition anticipates the artist’s major museum retrospective at Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026. -
Emil Sands: Salt in the throat
January 9 – February 15, 2025 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkFor his debut exhibition in Chelsea, Emil Sands explores shifting codes of human behavior and the influence of the surrounding world in a suite of new paintings. In the open air of a seascape or the shadows of a dense forest, Sands’ settings act as stage sets in which his cast of characters perform, reading one another's subtle gestures. As he exaggerates these figures and invites viewers to extrapolate on their relationships, Sands' considered brushwork and intuitive use of color combine to construct narratives filled with humor and pathos.
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