CHASSIDY WINESTOCK
Chassidy Winestock is a historian of modern and contemporary art currently developing a framework through which to encourage a reconsideration of modernist art and how artists contested modernism's catholic claims. The framework posits that in cases where the body has seemingly been evacuated, artists have found novel ways of manipulating modernist idioms in order to reassert it and thereby insert a politics into even the most radically abstract work. An example of her work in this vein can be seen in the 2024 exhibition, A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, she curated as the inaugural visiting curator at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. More information on the exhibition can be found at https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2024-a-female-landscape-and-the-abstract-gesture-exhibition.
"Line + sculpture = me."
Maren Hassinger
"Both the visual evocation and invitation to perform the haptic action reassert the human body. This is its form of embodied abstraction. These works also call into question the stability of the modernist surface."
Exh. cat. A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture (2024)
"The artists folded, twisted, pierced, and, most importantly, fastened, often repetitively, to highlight the labor of the art making, to materialize the line, to create their own abstract languages, and to assert the body."
"Importantly, A Female Landscape is equally as concerned with strict formalism as it is with authorial and bodily plenitude."
"The titles also remind us of the abstraction in these works. However, just as is done in Thompson's A Female Landscape, they express something more: the natural landscape. Further, in Hassinger's materialized lines, these . . . handmade gestures employing wire rope ultimately remind us that these images are not disembodied."
Exh. cat. A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture (2024)