James Fuentes Gallery

Opening reception: Saturday, September 7, 6-8pm

James Fuentes is thrilled to present Josephine Halvorson, New Hours. The artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles comprises ten new paintings alongside a suite of over sixty related Polaroids. The exhibition is accompanied by a new gallery publication, including written contributions from Jarrett Earnest and Justine Kurland alongside writing and photographs by Halvorson.

Halvorson approaches painting as a psychogeographic process of encounter with the world. The resulting works relate a one-to-one engagement that unfolds on a number of levels—temporal, narrative, material, atmospheric, and oftentimes interpersonal—describing subjects that appear both living and dead, familiar yet enigmatic, and free or not for sale. Each painting is faithful to Halvorson’s own perspectival distance in-situ, recounting the scale and proportion of what lies within reach and view. In preparation, Halvorson makes her supports and layers a modified gesso as her painting ground. Working in acrylic gouache, her brushstrokes dry immediately and opaquely, registering every decision as it happens. What gets absorbed is the veracity of this direct encounter; and, reflected, Halvorson’s sheer technical accomplishment as a painter.

The subject matter of Halvorson’s works remains latent in the objects she paints, which are often found discarded or exhausted in the margins and along the periphery. The surfaces of these sights and signs embed their own histories, where the painting now forms a plane between the artist and the thing, simultaneously capturing the expressions of both. Working entirely en plein air, Halvorson radically departs from the genre’s impressionistic roots; relating methodologically and conceptually to photography. The artist’s inclusion in the exhibition, for the first time ever, of her ongoing series of Polaroids taken throughout the painting process responds in new ways to this documentary facet of the work.

Halvorson never directly interferes with the staging of her subjects, preferring to paint them as they are found or land, however fleeting or permanent. In works like Free Library and I Help You, details may disappear or transform over the duration of her painting. Other works contain alternative records of change, like the revisions in a handmade sign (5 Acres) or a dead tree marked for removal (Smiley Face). As in the exhibition’s titular work, New Hours, a sense of civic time is announced through a sign that has in fact remained in place for a decade. The title also refers to Halvorson’s own evolving relationship to time through painting. Originally, she completed oil paintings in a single session before establishing her current way of working. Since 2019, she returns to the site to paint over the course of several days and weeks, gradually accruing a richness of description.

In foregrounding first-hand observation, Halvorson’s paintings thus speak to time embodied in its many forms: the age of a thing, daylight hours, seasonality, obsolescence, and evaporation. Now cohered into the painting we encounter, its subject exists in a new place outside of the rules of linear dimension or chronological time. In this sense, these works produce a hybrid genre, at once still lifes, portraits, and landscapes. In person, the surface of Halvorson’s paintings occasionally shimmer with a metallic pigment, reflecting their surroundings in real time, and the sense of air in between. In this moment, their motivation and their proof meet, encircling the liveliness of the physical world.

Josephine Halvorson (b. 1981, Brewster, MA) works primarily in painting, but also in sculpture and printmaking. She studied at Columbia University (MFA, 2007), The Cooper Union (BFA, 2003), and Yale Norfolk (2002). Halvorson’s work has been exhibited at Storm King Art Center, New York; ICA Boston; Havana Bienale; James Fuentes, Los Angeles; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and Peter Freeman, Paris. In 2021 she presented a solo exhibition of site-responsive work at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the Museum’s first artist in residence. Other residencies and fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2014-2015), the Harriet Hale Woolley at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France (2007-2008), and the US Fulbright to Vienna, Austria (2003-2004). Since 2016, Halvorson has been Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She lives in western Massachusetts.

James Fuentes would like to thank Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York for their collaboration on this exhibition.


PUBLICATION

JPF10: Josephine Halvorson