Emma Steinkraus: Impossible Garden
Exhibition Dates: July 8 - August 20, 2021
Opening: Thursday, July 8, 2021, 6 - 8pm, 6 - 8pm reception
39 White St (btwn Church & Broadway), Tribeca
Emma Steinkraus: Picking Oranges (for Dido Elizabeth Belle, Giovanna Garzoni, & Zaga Christ), 2021, oil and acrylic medium photo transfer on canvas, 48h x 36w inches
1969 Gallery is pleased to introduce Emma Steinkraus into the project space, presenting Impossible Garden, a multi-media layered project by the Virginia-based artist.
Steinkraus combines wallpaper installation with her craft as a delicate painter to claim space for the work of women artist-naturalists while navigating their entanglement with complex sociopolitical systems. A digitally produced mural wallpaper envelopes the space behind fantastical paintings of women informed by historical research. The vinyl wallpaper features images of flora and fauna made by more than one hundred pre-twentieth-century women, collaged together into a panoramic landscape with a pastel gradient sky. Steinkraus approaches her paintings in this project with a “hidden hand,” smoothly rendering densely detailed images that fuse together contemporary and historical references. In Picking Oranges (for Dido Elizabeth Belle, Giovanna Garzoni, & Zaga Christ), the female subjects reference Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray as they pick oranges from a tree. Their gowns, patterned with several historical paintings including Giovanna Garzoni’s Zaga Christ portrait, pay homage to the complexities of the individual lives of such historical female figures. Steinkraus illuminates and grapples with the larger cultural forces that shape her subjects and references.
Emma Steinkraus (b. 1987) is a painter based in Virginia. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Williams College and later a Masters in Fine Arts in Painting & Drawing with an Intermedia concentration from the University of Iowa. Steinkraus’s work has been recently exhibited at Deanna Evans Project, Brooklyn (2021) and Field Projects, New York (2020); and is forthcoming at Binder Projects, Memphis (2021) and Here Gallery, Pittsburgh (2021). She has been awarded artist residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Wassaic Project, and the Blue Mountain Center. She was a 2020 Eliza Moore Fellow at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and is currently a Helen Frankenthaler Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.
For inquiries, please contact:
Quang Bao (quang@1969gallery.com) Madeline Ehrlich (madeline@1969gallery.com)