MARCIA HAFIF: Four Paintings, Four Drawings

Curators: Heidi Nivling and Larry Becker

From mid-March through mid-May we will present two small groups of seminal works which basically cover the significant event of Marcia Hafif’s return to painting as a lifelong project in the early 1970s after having renounced the practice (as many artists did at the end of the 1960s, with many never returning to making any form of visual art whatsoever). This was an attempt by some to question what, if anything, we should put into the world that might be of any significant value in terms of meaning or meaningfulness and in terms of one’s action as an artist. She entirely discarded every possible aspect of painting up to that point in western culture. In order to “begin at the beginning”, she began the daily practice of making very plain matter-of-fact drawings on vertical paper using only simple logically ordered graphite pencil marks. This was the way by which she reentered, and she then started with the most elemental materials, grinding pigments into oil to make paint.

The drawings continued through the rest of her life. The paintings took on the structure of a long project looking into the very aspects of painting itself… all without any image or form breaking the seemingly monochromatic surface plane. These are some of the only remaining works available today in this series of paintings from ‘The Table of Pigments’ and the drawings are part of each of the series she executed over the remainder of her lifetime beginning in the early 1970s. Hafif’s work is strongly associated with—and is in fact largely pioneering in—the large overall reexamination of the practice of painting itself, which still continues today.

Presented in honor of Marcia Hafif, American Painter (1929-2018).