Carving with Color

Carving with Color took Henri Matisse's late paper cut-outs as its organizing principle. Its title comes from the way Matisse described that work: "Sculpting the living color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptors."

Late in life, weakened by illness and mostly confined to his home, Matisse set down his paintbrush and took up scissors. He cut colored paper into shapes, pinned them to his studio walls and arranged them until each composition was right, and what began as a necessity became a late burst of invention.

Eleven artists working across collage, painting, printmaking and sculpture took up that idea: Laura Crehuet Berman, Joanne Freeman, April Hannah, Liz Jaff, Sophie Klerk, Jonathan Lawes, Jon Legere, Naomi Reis, Rebecca Stern, Rene Vasquez and Aaron Wexler. Several of them cut and layer paper as their main studio practice, so the work insists on its presence in physical space; others build paintings and prints from the arrangement and overlap of shapes and the negative space carved out between them. In every case shape, rather than line, sets the rhythm: subtracting in order to add, carving in order to create.

The exhibition opened with a reception on Thursday, July 7, 2022, and ran through August 27.