Jane Freilicher: Parts of a World

Freilicher’s light-swept canvases are instantly recognizable for their framing of everyday objects within the context of the order, or casual disorder, of the artist’s studios in lower Manhattan and Long Island. Often situating the viewer at the threshold of the inside and outside, her scenes are derived from reality but painted into a fiction. 

The exhibition further demonstrates the variance and fluency of Freilicher’s mark-making, from tight brushstrokes to a looseness that suggests its subject by collapsing distance or combining multiple perspectives. Lending its title to the exhibition, Parts of a World (1987) renders a vaporous downtown skyline bathed in diaphanous peach above a tablecloth, ghost-like, that holds objects of remarkable solidity. An early work, The Painting Table (1954) takes us into the evening under fluorescent lighting, which nevertheless allows the dissolving of the object into one pale corner. John Ashbery, a close friend of Freilicher’s, articulated this phenomenon: “Her pictures always have an air of just coming into being, of tentativeness that is the lifeblood of art.”

At a time when many are more sensitively attuned to their indoor spaces and the aesthetic pleasure they provide, Freilicher’s commitment to, and belief in, the formal richness of these quotidian domiciliary views engenders a lesson in close looking. The artist’s freely improvised compositions incorporate the inventive reorganization of the same objects over the course of more than 50 years—a cast of characters of which she never tires. Whether it is the warmth of draped fabric sitting under a floral arrangement, a collection of ceramic bowls and plates, plastic nursery pots, or a casual lunch of bread and fruit, the confidence and optimism of Freilicher’s brush convinces us to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.