Lucy Puls: Righting

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Righting, a project space exhibition by California-based artist Lucy Puls, her third solo exhibition with the gallery.

In 2009, amid the wake of the financial crisis, Lucy Puls began photographing interiors of bank-owned homes. Rather than producing comprehensive views of architectural space, Puls focused on fragments. A corner, a wall, a threshold, a damaged surface, or a partial view of a room take up the entire frame. In 2011, Puls began developing the Geometria Concretus series from these photographs — an ongoing engagement that runs alongside a broader body of work drawing on the same images, both before and since. The Geometria Concretus series is predicated on a central consideration: whether an image could be “corrected” by masking or altering sections of a formerly arbitrary composition.

Mounted onto aluminum or Dibond, the photographs are physically altered through the application of gouache, thinly cast polyurethane resin, mixtures of mica, whiting, minerals, and metals. Adhesives lift ink from the photographic surface while resin and mineral compounds constellate into lines, planes, and geometric forms. Puls regards this physical intervention as a metaphor for the desire to repair a rupture whose consequences are both material and psychological. The displacement of a household, understood initially as the loss of a physical structure, having implications that are rooted much deeper and persist far beyond the architecture itself.

Lucy Puls (b. 1955, lives and works in Berkeley, CA) received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1980. She has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; P. Bibeau, Brooklyn, NY; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Memorial Union Gallery at University of California, Davis, CA; and Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, among others. Group exhibitions include BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; and DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, among many others.

Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco, CA and the Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Puls is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California, Davis.