Paul Sietsema’s Laborious Process at Matthew Marks Gallery

Process is paramount to Paul Sietsema‘s image-making.

Unravelling themes of production and consumption within art and culture, Paul Sietsema’s latest exhibition Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (24 February–15 April 2023), implores audiences to question the authenticity of what is on display.

In Grand Palais painting (2023), viewers are met with the familiar, simple shapes and earth-toned palettes synonymous with Pablo Picasso‘s oeuvre.

Borrowing Picasso’s reduction of form, Sietsema’s ‘Grand Palais painting’ series (2023) mimics the Cubist master’s extraordinary amalgamation of the figurative and abstract, while embedding the artist’s own mark-making with careful, hand-replicated brushstrokes.

Sietsema’s labour-intensive attention to detail renders the replications from his ‘Grand Palais painting’ series startlingly similar to Picasso’s original works.

Other works on display include Sietsema’s ‘phone painting’ series (2018–2022). Each work is laboriously made by mixing paint to match the telephone’s original colour, pouring the mixture over the phone, photographing the paint-covered phone, and painting the final image on canvas by hand.

Probing the middle ground between realism and painting, Sietsema’s ‘phone painting’ series considers how paint can be viewed as both subject and medium.

Main image: Paul Sietsema, Yellow phone painting (2022). Enamel on linen in artist's frame. 75 × 74 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.