Rebecca Ness and Joel Shapiro at Morgan Presents
“Studio Customer” is a two-person exhibition that incorporates a choice of new figurative work by rising artist Rebecca Ness. All of them have been hung to encompass Untitled, 2021, a deep-blue, freestanding wooden sculpture by famend Minimalist Joel Shapiro—his sole contribution to the present.
Whereas many artists have rendered their very own studios—most famously Henri Matisse, and extra lately, Lisa Yuskavage—Ness units about depicting others’ areas, capturing her fellow thinkers and makers at work inside them. Her strategy is marked by meticulous element—see the lettering of file names on the titular topic’s desktop in Willie, 2021–22—whereas broader stylizations imbue her large-scale tableaux with a vivid, nearly animated character. Ness portrays her topics with a transparent affection and demystifies the oft-mythologized artistic course of with an affable, unpretentious matter-of-factness. She does this most compellingly in Mike, 2021–22, by which we see the artist transferring amid the litter of his storage. The room’s fluorescent lights spill into the night time, illuminating pebbles and foliage past the concrete flooring.
In the meantime, Shapiro’s sculpture — constructed out of six rectangular blocks and set on a brief plinth—counters Ness’s vibrant, naturalistic settings through a chic, easy abstraction. Framed by these work, Shapiro’s pared-down however vaguely figurative type echoes the individuals in Ness’s photos, navigating the fragmented group of their respective environments. With this, Shapiro’s piece conjures the stuff of your typical artist’s studio, stuffed with uncooked supplies and infinite potential. The sculpture’s off-kilter stance additionally calls to thoughts the excited pose of somebody within the throes of a serious eureka second, wanting to see by way of the work at hand.
