SHFAP presents The Rag Trade, a group exhibition in two parts on the relationship of painting to textiles. Part One will take place at the NADA New York 2018 art fair, in their new location at Skylight Clarkson Sq, 550 Washington Street. Part Two will take place at our gallery, located at 208 Forsyth Street, just below Houston Street.

The relationship between painting and textiles is complex and longstanding. Linen, a primary support for painting, lends the painting a subtle rippling surface and texture. Tapestries from the Renaissance existed in close counterpoint to old master painting. Later, the correspondences between American quilt making and 20th century abstraction are evident in the arrangements of rectilinear forms and collage-like technique. In modern art, Anni Albers and Sonia Delauney moved in between painting and textile design. Artists as diverse as Blinky Palermo, Alan Shields, Katherine Bernhardt, Katerina Fritsch, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving have embraced the multiple dimensions of textile and art. In The Rag Trade, works by Giordanne Salley, Sedrick Huckaby, Christopher Wool, Liv Aanrud, Matt Phillips, and earlier Gandy Brodie play with this correspondence.

A concurrent installation at SHFAP’s space at 208 Forsyth Street opening Wednesday, March 7th, presents additional work by Matt Phillips, Liv Aanrud, Sedrick Huckaby and Meghan Brady, along with pieces by Lauren Luloff, Jason Stopa, Gandy Brodie and Sangram Majumdar.

Lauren Luloff melds a synthesis of color field painting and fabric collage. With nods to Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claude Viallat, her large scale painted stretched fabric collages use bleach and dye to paint into printed fabrics. She reveals the structure of painting by uncovering the stretcher bars beneath the work interacting with her stretched, collaged fabrics.

Jason Stopa has moved from loose, painterly abstract pop imagery into decorative imagery that speaks to late Matisses’s ideas of painterly decoration. He will make a room-sized painted installation at SHFAP in August.
Sangram Majumdar has evolved from a master of observed representational imagery in the early 2000s to a kind of abstraction derived from observation, often of flat surfaces. His recent works were surveyed at the Houston Asia Society last summer.

Gandy Brodie (1925-1975) was a significant 2nd generation New York School painter who was critically supported by Meyer Shapiro among others. He painted densely worked canvasses of stripped down imagery. Brodie, who grew up in the Lower East Side, used the facade of a tenement building as one of his primary motifs, flattened so it resembles the divisions of a quilt. Brodie’s work is in many significant institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMa, and the Whitney Museum.

Sedrick Huckaby is a Dallas based painter who has moved his practice of painting from life into the realm of social sculpture. He documents his own family, families in his community, and portraits of individuals. He portrays people who might not be traditional subjects for portraiture. He has also painted quilts from his family and community, occasionally on a monumental scale, depicting the sense of handmade objects made with love related to a subculture of African American pictorial design. He received a BFA in painting at Boston University and a MFA at Yale. He had a solo exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in 2017. His work will be included in March in the 2018 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Liv Aanrud is a Los Angeles based textile artist. She changed her preferred medium from painting to to textile work, influenced by the hooked rug technique employed by her grandmother. Recently, her abstract (and painted) textile work has extended into figuration. First Date is a comic “Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe,” re-interpreted by Eilshemius. Aanrud received her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2011, and just returned from a residency in Taiwan.

Matt Phillips is a Brooklyn based painter. His body of abstract paintings are often deeply related to textiles, specifically African American Gee’s Bend quilts which remain a profound influence on his work. Making his own paint from liquefied pigments suspended in a silica-based medium, his surfaces have an aqueous quality related to fabric printing just as his forms have a fluid building block structure related to quilting patterns. Phillips had one-person exhibitions at SHFAP in 2013 and 2016. He received his MFA from Boston University. He now teaches at F.I.T. in New York City.