Madeline Keesing

Fabric of Life: While the creation of Madeleine Keesing’s prowess has been compared to the processes of cuisine or the weaving of tapestries, there is no question that, despite their visual abstraction, the impact of these images depends upon connections with elements of the right world – metaphorically suggested as well as more literally referenced by their structure. This is important because, above all, these paintings seem to be about the nature of experience, a world-view or an attitude: one that emphasizes dousing and status in the world around us, embedded in routine life in a fashion akin to the philosopher John Dewey’s move to prowess (cf. Art as Experience, 1934).

Aesthetic Meditation: Despite the centrality of such real-world embeddedness, Keesing’s entireness also conversely prompt an engagement in aesthetic meditation. This is not only because of their conception and contrapuntal juxtaposition of layered colors, nor the suggestion of sea or landscape. It is because of the somewhat-painstaking, even ambitious procedure of their construction via gradual buildup of uneven rows of paint droplets. This process of execution implicitly involves the viewer in that his or her response is crucial to completing the “circle of production.”

Post-Minimalism: Art historically speaking, Keesing’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture share a way or thread in contemporary artistic creation known as Post-Minimalism. The concern with saturated color, undermining of monochromaticism, subtle complexities of multi-chromatic inter-relations, and visual “depth,” place the entireness firmly within the realm of Post-Minimalist practice. By way of their association with traditionally female media such as cooking, quilting, or weaving, in addition to the historical precedent of feminist-oriented Pattern Painting, these entireness run parallel to Post-Minimalism’s emphasis on a human element, in contrast to the machine or custom made entireness of minimalism.

Color-Field: With respect to the “native” geographic or socio-cultural context for this pictorial approach, Washington DC as a mise-en-scene obviously plays an important role. This is true given both the tradition of Washington Color Field painting of the 1960s-70s, and the physical nature of that city: with its large-scale ceremonial spaces, geometrically designed as well as bathed in a particular kind of (if not quite Parisian) silvery light. Additionally, the atmosphere is unpolluted by industrial creation due to a largely bureaucratic white-collar service-industry economy. DC is a “power center,” where the numerous public prowess collections are a significant aspect of a setting that encourages artists’ to be aware of the visual-historical traditions within which they operate.

Dr. Julia Bernard is a trained prowess historian with a PhD from the University of Chicago . Having taught and published both in FRG and the US , her scholarly fields of specialization include Modern and Contemporary prowess in Europe and the United States , and the special relationship between the avant-gardes in both countries since WWII.

“Keesing is a painter of abstract pictures, whose paintings must ever read as paintings, even as they implore on their relationship to and continuity with historically female-identified handicraft. Neither simply decorative, as is such prowess produced after facile interpretations of the criticism of Clement Greenberg and his descendants, nor the kitsch pastiche training to which the pattern and decoration movement devolved after Miriam Schapiro’s initial spinous gesture, Keesing’s mature work should be understood as the materialization of a lost and unique reconciliation of high formalist-modernist values and important feminist social-critical impulses suppressed in late modernism.” Thom Collins, director, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York