Karen LaMonte: Sartoriotypes

KAREN LAMONTE Sartoriotypes

Cover: Impression Child’s Dress, 2001

KAREN LAMONTE Sartoriotypes

24 East 78th Street New York, NY 10075 1011 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 gpgallery.com @geraldpeterscontemporary

SARTORIOTYPES For Karen LaMonte, printmaking is “recording an event…capturing a single moment;” describing how ink meets paper to leave an indelible impression. Her series of Sartoriotype prints are monotypes, each created from ink-soaked garments. LaMonte gathered the vestments from thrift and second-hand shops: children’s party dresses, men’s overcoats, jeans, wigs, even false eyelashes—all bearing ineradicable traces of their former owners, providing glimpses of the absent wearer’s story.

Thematically, the Sartoriotypes are connected to the larger body of work that LaMonte shaped during the early 2000s: Absence Adorned. Like much of the sculpture that comprises the series, the prints ask us to consider how clothing influences, shapes, and reflects identity. However, these works have not been extensively exhibited. This exhibition brings forward a selection of these remarkable works – many of which have never been seen by the public.

PROCESS In 2001, having just completed her Fulbright year in Prague, LaMonte took an opportunity to work with an industrial-scale press—powerful and large enough to realize her vision of using clothing as printing plates.

Applying hydraulic jacks to press fashions saturated with ink, LaMonte transcribed the texture of material, buttons, bows and seams, to paper. In some examples, she used paper that was itself made from reconstituted clothing. The resulting works expose imprints of the bodies that lived in these clothes; torn stiches, stains, a coin lost in the lining of a coat—many of which were not visible to the naked eye, but documented by the printing. In this way, as LaMonte puts it, the Sartoriotyopes are “ X-rays” laying bare the marks of the past.

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KAREN LAMONTE Karen LaMonte graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990 and created her first major work, Vestige (2000), during a Fulbright scholarship in Prague. Her works are included in important public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. LaMonte’s works have been exhibited at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and at Glasstress, an exhibition held during the Venice Biennale, in 2017 and 2019. In 2018, her largest museum exhibition to date was mounted at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee. LaMonte has received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennale Award and the James Renwick Alliance Master of the Medium award, and recently completed the Specialty Glass Residency at Corning Incorporated’s research lab.

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Impression 16 Overcoat, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print with brown ink on Somerset paper 60 × 41 2/3 inches

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Impression Child’s Dress, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on smooth art paper 25 2/3 × 23 inches

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Impression Christening Dress, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on pre-cut pale pink paper 40 1/2 × 26 inches

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Impression Child’s Dress, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on etching paper 30 × 22 inches

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Impression 5, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on Arches White paper 58 × 42 inches

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Impression 7, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on art paper 49 × 37 2/3 inches

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Incidence Suit, 2001 Diptych Sartoriotype. Monotype print on Lana Gravure paper 75 × 54 inches

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Eyes, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on paper made by LaMonte from a sweatshirt, blue jeans and underwear 12 × 9 inches

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Gazes, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on Lana Gravure paper 25 2/3 × 47 1/4 inches

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Impression Bonnet, 2001 Sartoriotype. Monotype print on thick handmade paper with hemp paper applied on top 22 × 11 1/4 inches

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For information please contact Alice Hammond 505.954.5743 ahammond@gpgalleryny.com

24 East 78th Street New York, NY 10075 1011 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 gpgallery.com @geraldpeterscontemporary