Bob van Orsouw

Julia Dault

31 Aug - 05 Oct 2013

© Julia Dault
Eye of the Tiger
JULIA DAULT
Excellent Adventure
31 August – 5 October 2013

Galerie Bob van Orsouw is pleased to present Julia Dault‘s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Dault, a native of Toronto, Canada, lives in Brooklyn, New York. A painter and sculptor, she employs an innovative array of materials and techniques in works that pay equal heed to process and to final form.
Dault’s paintings and sculptures both demonstrate the interaction between her fluid gestures and the limitations of her industrially produced materials. To make her sculptures, Dault bends sheets of Plexiglas and Formica, among other materials, into curving, site-dependent forms that are secured with straps. Each sculpture is evidence of a private performance, demonstrating the exact meeting point of her physical capabilities and her materials’ inherent characteristics. These works are not pre-planned; Dault avails herself of no assistance from others; the materials are not cut to size; and she uses no hidden means of fixing the sheets in place. This transparency extends to the sculptures’ titles, which describe the total time, from start to finish, of the artist’s labor.
Reciprocity between physical gesture and material constraint also characterizes Dault’s paintings. The „found,“ unaltered color of her sculptural materials has a parallel in her choice to use only unmixed, commercially available paint colors. To create her paintings, Dault uses nontraditional tools, such as combs, door handles, and squeegees, to remove paint and reveal layers previously laid down. The tools create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction, which gives evidence of the artist‘s hand, and cool, machine-like facture. This tension is also found in the way many of her compositional elements repeat methodically across the canvas. Yet these structured rhythms break down, thus revealing their human origin.
Julia Dault was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1977. Her work is currently on view in „In the Heart of the Country“ at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and will be featured later this year in „Outside the Lines“ at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. She has presented solo exhibitions at Jessica Bradley, Toronto (2013), and as part of the series Inside the White Cube at White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). In 2012 she participated in Roundtable, the Ninth Gwangju Biennale, and The Ungovernables, the second New Museum Triennial. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.
 

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