Statement, Sarah Gutwirth

METAPAINTING

I am drawn to the decorative arts and the design of interior spaces and how those human spaces derive much of their imagery from forms in nature that are reiterated and re-articulated. I am interested in what a painting seeks to make present and how those aspects are in dialogue with its architectural and decorative setting. I think of my paintings as intended for domestic spaces: reflective of the kinds of collecting and decorating activities that humans use to adorn those spaces, and which in many ways reflect the taxonomizing principles of the human mind, as it seeks to interpret the world of sense experience.

I grew up visiting period rooms in museums, and have had the opportunity to travel quite widely to see artworks in their intended spaces as well as in many museums. I retain intensely the sense of how a painting functions in a space of worship or a living space, integrated with architecture and décor, and subject to the light of windows as well as to other sources of light. I am thinking more consciously about the articulation of space in a painting, relating this to the objects and places we humans inhabit, but also to the illusionistic and contradictory spaces of paintings. Among other things, these works explore painted spaces, which serve as the frames or precincts for other virtual paintings (within the painting). This is not about art history as a distanced academic subject, however but more as an extension of the language of decorative/imaginative environments as they were meant to be incorporated into lived spaces. They are also like memory palaces, in that they represent the collecting activities that are a mirror of the way the mind stores information to be visited in the form of memory and brought to consciousness.


	METAPAINTING I am drawn to the decorative arts and the design of interior spaces and how those human spaces derive much of their imagery from forms in nature that are reiterated and re-articulated. I am interested in what a painting seeks to make present and how those aspects are in dialogue with its architectural and decorative setting. I think of my paintings as intended for domestic spaces: reflective of the kinds of collecting and decorating activities that humans use to adorn those spaces, and which in many ways reflect the taxonomizing principles of the human mind, as it seeks to interpret the world of sense experience. I grew up visiting period rooms in museums, and have had the opportunity to travel quite widely to see artworks in their intended spaces as well as in many museums. I retain intensely the sense of how a painting functions in a space of worship or a living space, integrated with architecture and décor, and subject to the light of windows as well as to other sources of light. I am thinking more consciously about the articulation of space in a painting, relating this to the objects and places we humans inhabit, but also to the illusionistic and contradictory spaces of paintings. Among other things, these works explore painted spaces, which serve as the frames or precincts for other virtual paintings (within the painting). This is not about art history as a distanced academic subject, however but more as an extension of the language of decorative/imaginative environments as they were meant to be incorporated into lived spaces. They are also like memory palaces, in that they represent the collecting activities that are a mirror of the way the mind stores information to be visited in the form of memory and brought to consciousness.