VIENNA.- At the center of Lecia Dole-Recio's paintings stands the materiality of the support medium, on which she works and which she manipulates. Instead of using prefabricated canvases, Dole-Recio usually creates her own surfaces: she collages paper, various kinds of cardboard, and fabric to produce a substratum on which she paints, only to deconstruct the result by carving into it. The saturation and composition of the colors contribute as much to the quality of her work as the depth of the positive and negative spaces she uncovers with the stencil knife. Lecia Dole-Recio lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the renowned Art Center in Pasadena and CalArts in Valencia, CA. In this Secession exhibition the artist presents a selection of her latest works.

The conditions of painting as a medium as well as the history of abstraction are important points of reference for Lecia Dole-Recio’s artistic practice. Her visual compositions are marked by complex layerings of various materials: canvas, cardboard, paper, and paint. In the volumes created in this way, the artist makes precise cuts and thus works from the visual support. Geometrical shapes are arranged in organic-seeming constellations and patterns that have an affect on the space around them.

In this Secession exhibition, her first show in Austria, Lecia Dole-Recio presents a selection of her latest works. The exploration of a spatial perception of painting that is manifest in her previous oeuvre is expanded in these most recent works by adding a temporal component. The artist here uses the remains and scraps of earlier work processes, negative images, as it were, of already existing works that she collages and treats in her usual manner. In so doing, not only does she suspend the distinction between “valuable” material and waste, but also underscores the variety and processuality of her art.

It becomes clear that an artist like Dole-Recio takes the abstract painting as a starting point, but in the meantime deconstructs it using the theoretical and formal stock of installation. This is visible in a quite literal sense already in her early works: fragile paper elements and other materials are applied to the canvas, the clarity and stability that we know from past abstract painting seems to have dissolved, the sensual impression is on first glance often more comparable to a Calder mobile than to painting. The paintings are not bound to the canvas, their materiality dissipates in the space around them.

The new works in this exhibition even go a step further by at the same time taking a step backwards. Dole-Recio here ventures even closer to the motifs and surfaces of classical abstraction. The surfaces of the works are more stable, at first a great deal more clarity seems present. What has remained is the method of collage, materials alongside the paint, like fabrics or cardboard. Only on closer inspection does the content step forward from the work: here too, the materials are glued to the surface, the canvas is the frame in a material sense and made invisible by way of its paint. Some of the materials used look like the leftovers of past work processes; here the work is defined as it were as the negative of a different work. This should be read as a reference to the emergence of the work as a process that places itself as an idea almost equal in stature alongside the work. (Martin Prinzhorn, excerpt from his catalog text).

Biographical outline
Lecia Dole-Recio was born in 1971 in San Francisco, USA, where she lives und works. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in1994 and in 2001 from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.

Sool exhibitions (selection): 2011/09/05/04/02 Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; 2006 MOCA Focus: Lecia Dole-Recio, curated by Brooke Hodge, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (cat.); 2004 Galerie Stephan Adamski, Aachen.
Group exhibitions (selection): 2009 CUT: The Makings of Removal, Wingall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga; Scores, Lawrimore Project, Seattle; Lecia Dole-Recio with Anya Kielar and Yuko Murata, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; 2008 LA Now, Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas (cat.); Zuordnungsprobleme, Johann König, Berlin; Cohabitation: 13 Artists and Collage, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann, Milan; 2007 Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles, Sprüth Magers, Munich; Good Morning, Midnight, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; 2006 LAXed: Paintings from the Other Side, Peres Projects, Berlin; Arge Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano (cat.); 2005 In the Abstract, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica; 2004 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (cat.); 2003 Peres Projects, Los Angeles; A Red Letter Day, Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York; Ishtar, Midway Contemporary Art, St. Paul; Painting Show, Vienna Art Space, Chicago; 2002 Tomma Abts, Morgan Fisher, James Hayward, Lecia Dole-Recio, Daniel Buchholz Galerie, Cologne; 2001 Snapshot: New Work from Los Angeles, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (cat.); Paintland, Lemon Sky, Los Angeles.