Sandi Slone Joanna Borkowska Material/Immaterial - curated by Lilly Wei

Material/Immaterial

Sandi Slone Joanna Borkowska

Material/Immaterial

The Kosciuszko Foundation, New York, 2021

Material/Immaterial In 2018, Joanna Borkowska crossed paths with Sandi Slone at Art Omi, the international artists residency in upstate New York. Borkowska was immediately drawn to Slone – who was there to meet the artists and give critiques – recognizing in her and her work a kindred spirit. As one result of that encounter, the Warsaw/New York–based Borkowska invited the Manhattanbased Slone to show with her at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York as part of a two-person exhibition, continuing their conversation about painting, founded on a shared bewitchment with paint. ey have much in common. ey are both primarily painters, and painters who are women, although Slone has experimented with other mediums and formats during her five-decade career. Both are deeply enamored of painting and its illustrious history, something shared by a growing number of younger artists who have rediscovered in it a richly rewarding medium, even – or perhaps especially – in our digitalized age. Slone and Borkowska are abstract artists but of two different generations. Slone came of age during the 1970s in the United States, when Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting had triumphed but were considered moribund, as was painting itself – erroneously, as we all know. It was also the period when a growing cohort of formidably talented women artists was flexing its collective creative muscle, demanding parity. Borkowska, raised and educated in Poland, was an academic originally with a doctorate in political science, pivoting exclusively to artmaking only in 2007. She feels a particular affinity with more minimalist artists such as Richard Pousette-Dart, Mark Tobey, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Richard Serra.

Natural-born, fearless colorists, both Slone’s and Borkowska’s paintings tilt toward a full-spectrum palette. Reveling in the nature of the medium, in its materiality, its glamour, sensuousness, versatility, and infinite mutability, they invite their viewers to do the same: to plunge themselves optically into painted space/time, venturing into perceptual realms of matter and voids while constructing and navigating shifting fields of force. You might think of them as “painternauts.” ey both approach paint with deference, acutely sensitive to what the paint is expressing and to the give and take between the paint’s volition and theirs. ey are unafraid of scale, deftly adjusting their imagery to the dimensions of their supports, from the expansive to the moderately sized, as shown here, to some that are barely two handspans. e images, regardless, are of comparable, if different, potency, not something every artist achieves.

I see their paintings as essentially panoramas, underscoring their landscape intimations, their source in the physical world. Slone and Borkowska, although abstractionists, claim nature as their inspiration, since isn’t all art ultimately 4

representational, referential, abstracted from something? And, at the very least, painting has its own reality, as a thing that exists in the world, that represents itself.

Pouring paint is a technique they share. It’s a method that embraces the physicality of paint and fortuitous, one-off configurations, harnessing chance to the process. It might also be thought of as the documentation of a moment, even a portrait – this time, this place, these gestures, and irreproducible.

A standby of Modernist practice, artists from David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1930s (sometimes credited as the first to make twentieth-century pour paintings) to Jackson Pollock and his game-changing drip paintings, to Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Larry Poons, and others have made exciting use of it. As do Slone and Borkowska. However, unlike some artists and schools of aesthetics, they both feel free to intervene as they wish, reclaiming artistic control.

Slone is intuitive, engrossed body and soul when she is pouring, in thrall to the rhythms of the act, like a dancer, her process requiring different modes of equally focused attentiveness. She pours or throws the paint onto a canvas that is usually rolled out on the floor, layering, gauging the interaction. en she lifts the often quite large support off the floor, angling it in different directions to create a pattern of rivulets and other incidents. “It’s like drawing in air and requires a lot of control,” Slone says. After that, if needed, she goes back in with a fine brush to clean up edges and connect drips, burnishing the patterns to suit her vision, as seen, for instance, in her magnificent Mercury (2016–2017), an arctic sweep of crackled silver, and Veiled Heat, Cold Snap (2016), its opposite, a volcanic eruption of luminous roses, reds, violets. Not only do you see the visual dynamics that have been established, but you can almost hear the colors snap, explode. As the artist, intervention is her right, her responsibility, she believes, cannily mixing artifice, chance, and gravity, “having a conversation with that” and with “memory, touch, body, intimacy, accidents, visual metaphors, the physicality of color, paint, the state of the world, the state of nature.”

Borkowska’s process, on the other hand, is more meditative, ritualized, coded.

It can take weeks or months for her to build up the reservoir of mental and emotional energy needed to attain the indescribable, almost mystical clarity that she depends on to start painting. She prefers oil and pigment to Slone’s oil, acrylic, and resin. And she titles her works by color and place with a fairly neutral descriptive term for each series – tending to work serially – such as FBGNY [Frequencies Blue Green New York] (2021) or FPYNY [Frequencies Pink Yellow New York] (2021), a stance once fiercely adopted by non-objective artists to forestall fixed readings and inferences or any interpretations beyond the thing itself. When Borkowska pours, she might let gravity take the lead,

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although she counters that by brushing upward as well. In Frequencies, one of the two elegant series shown here, she also goes back into the canvas, adding countless splatters – or tiny circles, as she thinks of them – using a brush or by hand, one by one, a painstaking process that is also a prolongation of the time she injects into the painting. At some point, she says, she “begins to perceive the paintings as an extension of my consciousness, as a part of the feedback loop between me and my surroundings.”

Borkowska’s work might seem monochromatic at first glance, but, upon further contemplation, the abundance of hues kicks in, as does its opulence.

In Frequencies and Resonances, the cascade of paint, which also seems to be accompanied by an imagined sound – a sizzle, a sonic reverb of sorts – suggests pure energy, a wall of matter that appears simultaneously to move and not, constellated by percussive, scintillating points of radiance.

Both artists are on a journey, like the explorers they are, each seeking to translate the ineffable into the material and then back again, each in their own way. ese expansive, numinous paintings are the results of their ongoing search, like messages in a bottle, tossed into the ebb and flow of the universe and retrieved from it.

Lilly Wei

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SANDI SLONE

Mercury 2017 Oil, acrylic, polymer, and silver and pearl pigments on canvas 62 x 62 in | 157.5 x 157.5 cm 10

Veiled Heat, Cold Snap 2016 Oil, acrylic, polymer and iridescent pigment on canvas 62 x 73 in | 157.5 x 185.4 cm 12

Mars Violet 2012-2019 Oil, acrylic, polymer and mica on canvas 63 x 43 in | 160 x 109.2 cm 14

Mars Violet (detail) 16

Vast 2012 Oil, acrylic and polymer resin on canvas 20 x 14 in | 50.8 x 35.6 cm 18

Molten 2011 Oil and acrylic on canvas 18 x 14 in | 45.7 x 35.6 cm 20

Joy Whisper 2012 Oil and acrylic polymers on canvas 36 x 36 in | 91.4 x 91.4 cm 22

Body Electric with Multitudes 2021 Acrylic and polymers on canvas 48 x 49 in | 121.9 x 124.5 cm 24

Madam B (Fathom) 2012 Oil, acrylic and mica on canvas 62 x 62 in | 157.5 x 157.5 cm 26

Blue Spirit Material 2016 Oil, acrylic and polymers on canvas 62 x 62 in | 157.5 x 157.5 cm 28

Blue Spirit Material (detail) 30

ink Back into the Ocean 2012-2016 Oil, acrylic, polymers, mica, and iridescent pigment on canvas 68 x 58 in | 172.7 x 147.3 cm 32

JOANNA BORKOWSKA

FBNY 2021 Oil and pigments on canvas 60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm 36

FBNY (detail) 38

FBGNY 2021 Oil and pigments on canvas 60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm 40

FBGNY (detail) 42

FPYNY 2021 Oil and pigments on canvas 60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm 44

FYNY 2021 Oil and pigments on canvas 60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm 46

Particles I 2018 Oil and pigments on canvas 12 x 12 in | 30.5 x 30.5 cm 48

Particles III 2021 Oil and pigments on canvas 12 x 12 in | 30.5 x 30.5 cm 50

Waves I 2018 Oil on canvas 12 x 9 in | 30.5 x 22.9 cm 52

Waves II 2020 Oil on canvas 9 x 12 in | 22.9 x 30.5 cm 54

RPNY 2020 Oil and pigments on canvas 9 x 12 in | 22.9 x 30.5 cm 56

RBGAO 2018 Oil and pigments on canvas 12 x 12 in | 30.5 x 30.5 cm 58

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Sandi Slone (b. Boston, Massachusetts) is a New York–based abstract artist who has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, among other academic appointments. Slone has exhibited widely with 40 solo shows internationally and her work has been acquired by numerous museums, art institutions, and private collections. She is a founding board member of Art Omi International and e Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, New York. Among other honors, she is the recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship.

Joanna Borkowska (b. Koszalin, Poland) is a Warsaw- and New York–based abstract painter. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and taught there until 2007. She had her debut exhibition at the National Museum in Szczecin in 2009 and has exhibited in Poland and internationally since then. Her work is held in numerous institutional and private collections. Borkowska has been an artist in residence at Matadero Madrid, Art Omi, and Residency Unlimited.

Lilly Wei (b. Chengdu, China) is a New York–based independent curator, art critic, writer, and journalist whose area of interest is global contemporary art with an emphasis on emerging art and artists. Wei’s writings have appeared in dozens of publications worldwide and she has curated exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

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is book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Sandi Slone Joanna Borkowska Material/Immaterial Curated by Lilly Wei e Kosciuszko Foundation, New York September 8 to October 8, 2021

President and Executive Director Marek Skulimowski Director of Cultural Affairs Ewa Zadworna Exhibition Partners e Kosciuszko Foundation 15 E 65th Street New York, NY 10065 (212) 734-2130 info@thekf.org www.thekf.org Polish Cultural Institute New York 60 E 42nd Street, Suite 3000 New York, NY 10165 (917) 821 3700 nyc.office@instytutpolski.pl www.InstytutPolski.pl/NewYork

Editor Jason Goldsmith Proofreading Melissa Miščević Bramble Courtney Bain Graphic Design and Typesetting Ewa Czarska www.lidesign.eu Photo Credits Dylan Peter Obser, pp. 11–33, 49 Jesse Winter/TEN10 Studios, NYC, pp. 37-47, 51-59 All rights reserved. © 2021 for the reproduced works by Sandi Slone: the artist © 2021 for the reproduced works by Joanna Borkowska: the artist © 2021 for “Material/Immaterial” by Lilly Wei: the author Printed by Drukarnia Skleniarz, Kraków www.skleniarz.eu Published by LI DESIGN www.lidesign.eu ISBN 978-83-934563-3-8 Printed in Poland