Elliott Puckette: New Work

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present our exhibition of new work by Elliott Puckette.  This exhibition  includes new paintings and works on paper at 293 Tenth Avenue and 511 West 27^th Street.  This is her first solo exhibition at the gallery in five years.

Puckette creates work incorporating an abstract visual vocabulary using gesso, kaolin, and ink.  Her ink washes function as grounds for her elegant, incised marks which often evoke the curvature of the body, musical notes, and 19^th century adornment. Puckette creates calligraphic, whiplash lines of exposed gesso by meticulously etching slender, precise lines on her inked panels.  In conceiving works with a lighter ground, Puckette similarly incises the surface to expose the gesso underneath.  She then fills the white voids with black ink, often giving the illusion of black ink painted over the ground.  Through the laborious process hidden behind the elegant ends, Elliott continually finds expressive purpose in abstraction. 

As a departure from her last group of work, the grounds are no longer the airy, effervescent cloud-like formations that reference the celestial forms of Constable.  Puckette creates nearly opaque grounds with nuances of color, thereby distinguishing the etched form in the foreground. 

 Elliot Puckette’s work is in a number of public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Huntsville Museum of Art.