Carolyn Case
Carolyn Case
"Wild Domestic"
April 4 - May 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 6-8PM. The artist will be present.
Asya Geisberg Gallery is excited to present "Wild Domestic," an exhibition by Carolyn Case. This will be the artist's fourth exhibition with the gallery, and the first in the gallery’s new location of 4.5 Cortlandt Alley (between Franklin St. and White St.). The artist's deceptively abstract work hides fragments and hints of the everyday, elevating routine and domestic duties to the realm of the ethereal, and allows the untidy to remain cleverly uncontained. The carefully distilled chaos of the kitchen and its symbolism for daily life propel the exhibition. The artist notes that“suspicions about my motives to keep order have crept in. One way for me to process these ideas is to bring the landscape back into the domestic world. That is where the title originates, a hopeful space where mess, uncertainty, beauty, and order combine, a wild domestic."
With titles like “Kitchen Window,” “Blue Spatula,” and “Morning Coffee,” Case quickly places the viewer into her domain: the habitual encounter with our quotidian environment. Switching between the kitchen and the studio, the paintbrush and the potholder, Case dissolves the wall between the brainwork of conjuring art out of the imagination, and the seemingly mindless necessities of the day-to-day – writing to-do-lists, washing dishes, or preparing a meal. From this unassuming starting point, Case produces grand paintings swirling with gesture, energy, and audacious color, layering fragments, shapes and marks, some barely legible as the original domestic reference. Unafraid to mix acidic purples or strike yellow against black, Case invigorates each visible inch with her nonconformist approach.
In a new development, Case has added intriguing hybrids of ceramic and pastel, smaller yet densely packed with narrative details. Orange peels, cigarettes, and fragments of plates or tiles intermingle with chunky or stringy forms, an exhilarating juxtaposition to the dense carpet of pastel. As her hybrids have evolved, they advocate as sculpture rather than a framing device for the center pastel, influencing the pastel’s shapes and colors in a call and response. Pastel drawings - the underpinning of Case’s painting - now contest the primacy of painting with their fragmented, jewel-like intensity and guttural intuitiveness. Looking at all the work together, the paintings appear more abstract, Baroque and stylized, as the ceramics make concrete the decoratively buried scraps.
Like Pierre Bonnard, an artist whose visual exuberance heeded not the hierarchy of outer activity and interior sphere, of background curtain or foreground figure, Case disputes the disregard for the “dull.” Everything is equally at play for abstract gestures; no field of references is allowed to fallow. "I’m in the studio, struggling for beauty and complexity. I go into the kitchen to chop onions or empty the dishwasher, and it’s all there. I stand at the sink washing dishes, my mind still on painting, and notice the exciting form of a half-submerged spatula and its shadow."