Michelle Rawlings
Rawlings’ practice is inspired by collections of images, both art historical and contemporary. Her figurative paintings are conceived as portraits of images rather than portraits of people—not painted from life but derived from fashion photography and familiar representations of women found in contemporary media. For her exhibition at Chapter NY, Rawlings’ modestly scaled works convey an intentional naivety, a tenderness that evokes empathy for distant subjects. Although this recent body of work exists in dialogue with Impressionist painters such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, Rawlings’ paintings do not represent moments of social intimacy. Her paintings of found images posit a greater level of remove, emphasizing the anonymity of unknown subjects at once recognizable and mysteriously aloof.
In contrast, Rawlings’ grid-like abstractions reference the ubiquity of the formal grid throughout art history. She was first inspired by Paul Klee’s, Affliction (1934), a portrait of a figure against a gridded background. For Rawlings, the repetition of this painting process has become compulsive—a way to explore color while offering an impressionistic counterpart to elaborate the tonal context of her figurative works. Paired with her figurative paintings derived from digital sources, her grids feel like zoomed in views of pixels. They suggest the potential of a representational image beyond visual perception.
The title of her exhibition, La fille aux cheveux de lin, is also the title of a musical composition by Claude Debussy from 1910, a light and improvisational prelude from an era referenced within Rawlings’ newest body of work. The playfulness and delicate quality of the song is carried throughout the artist’s paintings, which she created for this exhibition as a specific grouping and multipart composition of combined images.
Michelle Rawlings (b. 1980, Dallas, TX) lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. Rawlings has had recent solo exhibitions at And Now, Dallas, TX; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Raster, Warsaw, POL. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Rachofsky Warehouse, Dallas, TX; And Now, Dallas, TX; The Power Station, Dallas, TX; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, JPN; Galleri Rostrum, Malmö, SWE; KoncertKirken, Copenhagen, DNK; and the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; among others.