NEW YORK, NY.- Paula Cooper Gallery is presenting Jackie Winsor, Linnea Kniaz at 529 West 21st Street. This is the second in a series of two-person presentations at Paula Cooper Gallery’s 529 West 21st Street space curated by Laura Hunt, the gallery’s archivist.

In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of Jackie Winsor’s work, the first retrospective show of a woman artist in MoMA’s department of Painting and Sculpture since 1946. This type of pioneering accomplishment punctuates Winsor’s 50-year career. Included in that 1979 MoMA show and exhibited here again, Winsor’s early work Solid Lattice (1970) encapsulates Winsor’s ability to imbue raw materials such as wood, rope, and nails with willpower and elegance. Lucy Lippard has noted: “Winsor often refers to ‘muscle’ when she talks about her work, not just the muscle it takes to make the pieces and haul them around, but the muscle which is the kinesthetic property of wound and bound forms, of the energy it takes to make a piece so simple and still so full of an almost frightening presence.”1

Winsor created Solid Lattice by nailing narrow wooden slats together in a vertically oriented compact spiral, working outward from a dense core. The piece is compressed physically and energetically, occupying its encircled space with both force and restraint. This amassing of the layers of wood ironically causes the sculpture to lift slightly from the floor, giving it an illusion of hovering at its bottom edge. It is precisely this forthrightness and blunt intention that buoys the work into its own mysterious zone.

Linnea Kniaz is somehow both effusive and reserved. This paradox materializes in her work: a generous output is often buttressed by analytical observations of that output, such that the bulk of her work’s content locates itself in those observations on making. Consider these titles of paintings from 2013: What Surrounds the Special Mark is Now in the Special Mark, The Platform Underneath And The Platform Below, Trying to Connect a Mark and Its Platform. In the case of this exhibition, the street-level vitrine gallery is itself one of Kniaz’s “platforms” put to use. Installed freestanding on the gallery floor are three new works from Kniaz’s “Framework” series. Made of rounded wire cage-like forms, construction mesh, and paint, Framework 1, 6, and 11 read more like line drawings or mechanisms for garnering sensation than traditional sculpture. Skeletal and serial, the structures illuminate the kind of playful inversions, repetitions, and rephrasings that lend Kniaz’s vision its singular agility.

Jackie Winsor (b. 1941 St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada) has exhibited internationally since 1968 and currently lives and works in New York. She was included in the 1977, 1979, and 1983 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum. At the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1978, she was featured in the show Made by Sculptors. In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of her work, the first retrospective show of a female artist in the MoMA’s department of Painting and Sculpture since 1946, which traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas. In 1984, her work was featured in American Art Since 1970 at the Whitney Museum. P.S. 1 inaugurated its newly renovated space in Long Island City, Queens with a retrospective of her work in 1997. More recently, her work was included in Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007); Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s, Sculpture Center, New York (2008); and FORTY, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, NY (2016). Her solo exhibit Jackie Winsor: With and Within was held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT September 2014 through May 2015. The artist’s first one-person show with Paula Cooper Gallery was in 1972. She will have a solo show at the gallery this fall.

Linnea Kniaz (b. 1988 Chicago, IL) is an artist based in New York. She earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2016) and a BA with honors in visual art and art history from Skidmore College (2010). Kniaz has recently exhibited at Vacancy LA (Los Angeles, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Torrance Shipman Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Mint Gallery, CalArts (Valencia, CA), Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY), Bakersfield College (Bakersfield, CA), and at The Jewish Museum, New York as part of In Response: The Arcades. She has also been included in shows at numerous project spaces in Brooklyn including Greene & Nostrand, Helper Projects, Weekend Projects, and ZAX. This is the artist’s first time exhibiting at Paula Cooper Gallery.


1 Lucy R. Lippard, “Jackie Winsor,” Artforum, February, 1974, 56-58. ↩