Elliott Puckette

Biography

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Untitled, 2024

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Born in Lexington, Kentucky, 1967
Lives & Works in Brooklyn, New York

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"In Puckette's scheme, line conquers all." —David Anfam
Portrait by Charlie Rubin.

The elegant simplicity of Puckette’s line belies its complex process. With brisk, confident gestures, the artist etches inlets into board washed with layers of gesso and ink. The colored washes create distinctive atmospheres in each work—brooding storm clouds of gray and tumultuous seas of dark purple. Puckette uses a razor blade to draw her arcs, carving out pathways instinctively with exquisite light touch. Later, she returns to deepen the furrows with cross-hatching—a labor-intensive process that inherently slows the line, subtracting it from the painting and delineating its negative space.

In recent bodies of work, Puckette has developed her use of line by first rendering it three dimensions, making ephemeral sculptures out of wire. By translating the form of the maquette, Puckette flattens, and thus further abstracts, the line. As such, the works capture a silhouette of their three-dimensional references, a fleeting snapshot of perspective.

Puckette’s lines meander their terrain with no premeditated structure, recalling the tenets of Tachisme, the intuitive form of expression favored by European painters in the 1940s and 50s. At the artist’s Brooklyn studio, photocopied works spanning the annals of art history are arranged on one wall; an esoteric puzzle of visual references. While the artist is typically reticent to explicate her works, the blooming skies of John Constable and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo nod to a Romantic or sublime sensibility that is integral to Puckette’s own work. Elsewhere, etchings by Albrecht Dürer allude to the virtues of addition by means of subtraction mirrored in her practice.
Puckette’s committed and meticulous study of this particular formal strategy has been lifelong. Painting was considered in decline during her studies at Cooper Union, but Puckette stood by her minimalist logic, compelled by its potential. “It was always the line,” the artist has said, “I was completely compelled by the line from the get-go. It had more possibilities than form or shape or color.” This has remained Puckette’s primary visual staple since the occasion of her first exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery in 1993.

Born in 1967 in Lexington, KY, Elliott Puckette received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1989. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Fogg Museum, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. Puckette's first major monograph, replete with color plates, new essays by Dr. David Anfam and Stephanie Cristello, an ode by sculptor Maya Lin, and an in-depth artist interview, was published by Kasmin Books in 2023.
Works
Elliott Puckette

Hackamore, 2007

ink, gesso and kaolin on wood panel
54 x 48 inches
137.2 x 121.9 cm

Further images

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- Elliott Puckette
  2023
  Hardcover, 194 pages
  ISBN: 978-1-947232-99-0
  Dimensions: 10 x 12.9
  View More
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