Leidy Churchman New You
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 11 March – 23 April
In 1435 the artist Leon Battista Alberti described painting as ‘an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen’. Sometimes these windows open inwards, onto subjects that reside in the human psyche; sometimes they cut through aspects of art that can be more readily theorised than perceived. The intimate scenes and broad vistas of Leidy Churchman’s New You o¡er all these views – internal and external, material and abstract, earthly and metaphysical – and summon both the history of art and the construction of the self in equal measure.
The content of this exhibition is so diverse as to feel like a scroll through an image bank. Nonetheless, each unframed canvas serves as its own frame around a subject that is profoundly searching. Several (In The Mood, So Bright and Ohh I like That…, all works 2021) approximate casements in warm pastel colours with the quietude of Agnes Martin paintings. These are hung salon-style with more comically figurative windows onto contemporary life, such as – an incoming call from the artist’s mother on their iphone screen – and Calculator, the square icon for the titular Apple app. There’s an aperture onto the artist’s bedside reading, too, with a faithful rendering of a dust jacket: Dying Every Day: Essence of the Bardos, a book about the states attainable after death. According to Tibetan Buddhism, in the afterlife you may eventually reach the bardo of becoming. To become the ‘new you’, you must leave your past self behind.
In the show’s most ambitious paintings, Churchman invites us to depart from this world and enter the sweeping landscapes of the soul. Seafoam rendered with the dappled softness of Gustave Courbet coats the rocks of Wonderland in white, beneath the watchful eye of a waxing moon. Eternal Life New You, Churchman’s largest wall-bound painting to date, imagines water lilies floating impossibly on the ocean’s salty surface. At the centre of this marine vista, a dark rectangular void both flattens our view and opens an escape hatch from reality. A similar crevasse has been rent from the grooved white edges of Not Knowing, like the bottomless melt hole in a glacier. Nature is the consummate space for self-reflection; look out Churchman’s windows and see in. Evan Mott