Elliott Puckette: Unfolding

Kasmin presents Elliott Puckette’s eleventh solo exhibition at the gallery. Unfolding features a suite of new paintings and bronze sculptures that expand upon the artist’s signature visual exploration of the line as a formal device to realize her atmospheric abstractions.

A state of uncertainty characterizes Puckette’s newest paintings of bent lines suspended in their cautionary settings. With turbulent brushwork, Puckette’s inky backdrops encroach upon her lines which hover in perpetuity, as if eternally treading water. On each surface, Puckette layers a thin coat of gray or black ink over a wash of pink, to the effect that a warm blush shines from beneath. The results create distinctly stormy environments reminiscent of the scumbled skies of John Constable. 

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“There is a lyric calligraphic poetry to Elliott Puckette’s work.”
—Maya Lin

Puckette’s compositions first find life as wire maquettes which the artist installs against her studio wall in a matter of minutes before disassembling. These ephemeral forms reflect the transient nature of the world, which the artist works to represent in two dimensions with a technique she has developed since the 1990s. Etching inlets with a razor blade into wood panels layered with gesso and washed with ink, Puckette delineates the state of emotional and physical flux that defines the human experience, which she describes as a recurring cycle of “looking, taking note, and looking again.” With a subtractive process evoking Old Master engraving techniques, Puckette observes the contours of her maquettes as a portraitist would study their sitter, capturing the bend of each curve in exacting detail.

Two new bronze sculptures will be featured, expanding Puckette’s foray into a medium she introduced to her practice in 2021. Inviting further immersion into the language, form, and logic of the line, Puckette’s sculptures complement the forms of her paintings in three dimensions. In memorializing her maquettes,  Puckette finds stasis among the ever-changing essence of the world. One of the new works is a wall-based sculpture that recalls the tools of the artist’s unique working process as much as the format for displaying the paintings themselves.

“In Puckette’s scheme, line conquers all,” wrote the late curator David Anfam in 2023. Against dynamic fields of ink, Puckette’s twisting shapes deepen her career-spanning investigation of the power of the line through the lens of a world defined by change.