Scholz's paintings have always moved between representation and abstraction, tracing and layering high-speed, spontaneous forms from out of projected images culled from newspapers and books marginal to the larger flows of culture -- and fixing them, whether on canvas or wall, into direct architectural relation to their surroundings. Each painting finds its local identity by presenting a record of its own composition and history at the expense of the conceptual framework that seeded its first growth. In her new paintings this motion is reversed, leaving the original mark of 2004's Hurricane Frances unveiled -- but the works nevertheless come quickly unfixed from their casual representation.
Read MoreInfluenced by the experimental abstraction of Blinky Palermo and the pop self-consciousness of Sigmar Polke, the new paintings find a place where repetition, as in the language works of Gertrude Stein, uncovers the pure abstraction lurking in the prosodic articulations of modern consumer culture. A place where representation becomes an abstraction and abstraction is revealed depiction. Similar deconstructions occur in other media -- in the large-scale architectural experiment Baumhaus, and in Erdgarage, the wall-sized photographic print of a Los Angeles landslide. Scholz's architecture and photography stretch so far into their ordinary functions that they become like abstract paintings of themselves.
While painting has always sought for itself an isolationist relation to larger culture -- enforced either by conceptual irony or fantasies of high-art purity -- Scholz's new canvasses reflect a new impossibility of art's separation from the global histories outside. Humorously and intentionally failing self-portraits as well as garnerned evidence of mainstream culture's inability to contain meteorological climate change by old forms of information graphics, the new paintings spin violent and unfixed psychological and esthetic significations from the global context and return them unambiguously into the immediate spacetime of local reality -- a place where art, as in the photography of Stephen Shore, is free to be experienced on its own real-world terms.
Text courtesy Sprüth Magers.
