June Art Fair 2021: Lisa Beck, Nina Childress

For the June Art Fair 2021 Nathalie Karg Gallery is delighted to present a two-person booth featuring sculptural works by Lisa Beck and a series of new phosphorescent paintings by Nina Childress. This will be the gallery’s debut presentation for both Beck and Childress. The series of free-standing geometric, threshold-like sculptures we intend to show by Beck, all made in 2015, contain brightly colored panels intersecting with a reflective mylar counterpart.

 

These large-scale works act as the corners of an evanescent and partly immaterial architecture, like a portal door or the entry point into another dimension. Indeed, Beck takes her titles from translations of hieroglyphics, each designating a “house of” along with a spirit to whom it is dedicated. For example, the title pr- Maat translates to “the house of the goddess Maat” who weighed the souls of the dead against a feather when they passed into the afterlife. Beck’s work has always been driven by certain preoccupations and obsessions that can be seen as divided between the particular and the universal. For Beck, “the particular” is shorthand for the observable aspects of reality, the stuff around us (the landscape, our bodies). “The universal” is a shorthand for things that are too vast or too tiny for us to grasp completely (space, atomic physics), which necessarily become a kind of abstraction.

 

For Childress, we intend to show a suite of new paintings, and one monumental work on paper, depicting French popular culture icons of the 1970s and 1980s. The works on view pay homage to the Swiss disco star Patrick Juvet and French mother-daughter film stars Bulle and Pascale Olgier. Like Beck, Childress’ work is also deeply influenced by the double image or inherent double meanings. Childress often paints “good” and “bad” versions of the same image, using diverse painterly styles to transform the meaning and references imbued in her canvases into something new each time. Childress has recently began working in phosphorescent paint, which transforms the image when put under black light. With the inclusion of this new technique, Childress is now able to add an additional, semi-hidden, almost spectral second image into her work. In this way, like Beck, Childress explores the possibilities of using her work as a kind of portal into an alternate universe, where we have access to important, nostalgic images our past.