This exhibition of three young female artistsLos Angeles-based painter Mari Eastman, London-based Dutch painter Maaike Schoorel, and Alex Bircken, a German sculptor also known from her early-'90s gig as a Wolfgang Tillmans musehas at its center variations on the theme of fragility. Eastman's large painting of a sheepdog in front of a country manor employs her soft-focus, watery technique to create a daydream version of upper class English life. Schoorel's exquisite paintings, nearly invisible accumulations of pastel brushstrokes on creamy white grounds (here stained the faintest shades of blue, yellow, and green), divest themselves of Tuymans's washy melancholy while still stressing the ethereal nature of images, particularly ones pulled from the depths of memory. At first her canvases appear to be abstract compositions, but after a moment's looking the eye stitches together the spots of color, finding a delicate tabletop still life, a group of standing figures, and a portrait (of the artist's father). Bircken creates small pedestal-mounted sculptures in which her patient craft techniques (primarily knitting) are pressed into service as protectors of a number of broken, discarded branches. For one work she knitted a psychedelic colored sweater (of sorts) and wrapped it around a forlorn twig; the whole enterprise has a ritualistic humaneness.
2005-05
Bircken, Eastman, Schoorel
Artforum.com
Review
207 words

Installation view
2005
Courtesy of the artists and Maureen Paley Interim Art, London