War Frieze IX: Undue Burden (part 1: Undue), 1992 |
Semi-colon in a Flesh Comma, 1994 
Sign, 2005 
The Idea 2, 2010 |
Past ExhibitionMira SchorMira Schor: Paintings From The Nineties To NowNovember 20, 2010 – January 9, 2011 Installation Photos CB1 Gallery presented Mira Schor: Paintings From The Nineties To Now, the first major survey of Schor’s work to be shown in Los Angeles. Mira Schor’s paintings exist on the razor’s edge between visual and verbal language, between formalism and politics. A conceptual artist who is a painter’s painter, a feminist who is an odd inheritor of the approaches to painting of the New York School, Schor’s primary subject is the co-existence of embodiment and thought within the material and pictorial surface of painting. Using the materiality and meaning of these two sets of languages, Schor references femininity and intellectualism, the body in wartime, the politicization of the personal, the self-portrait of thought. The exhibition will be on view from November 20, 2010 through January 9, 2011. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, November 20, 2010 from 5 – 8 p.m. This exhibition traces a narrative of Schor’s work since the early 90s to the present, from Semi-colon in a Flesh Comma (1994) which punctuates the text of the female body, and Undue --a section of War Frieze, her major 1991-1994 200-running feet long multiple canvas work on militarism and aggression, painted in the aftermath of the first Gulf War but still as timely today-- through representations of the nature of artmaking itself – the sign, the trace – to the empty thought balloon when grief has left the artist at a loss for words, to her most recent works schematically figuring the artist as thinker, reader, writer in an uncertain world. Schor’s works share a characteristic flair for the drawn line, whether it be the flourish of her abstract handwriting or of a provisionally sketched figure, along with a passion for paint surface. She insists on working within a range of contradiction: her paintings are insistently modest yet radiantly intense, subversively political yet subtly private, schematic yet sensual, political but poetic. Her paintings have been exhibited in contexts that foreground painting, such as Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, at P.S.1 Museum; feminism, such as Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism, currently at the Jewish Museum in New York and Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" in Feminist Art History, UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum; and language, for instance Poetry Plastique, at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Schor is also the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, Daily Life and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture. She was awarded a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to develop an art blog, A Year of Positive Thinking. CB1 Gallery has published an essay in conjunction with the exhibition. Read Mira Schor: Making Thought Material, Painting (the Act of) Painting, by Amelia Jones. |
