NEW YORK, NY.- Marc Straus announced that Jeanne Silverthorne is now represented by the gallery. A comprehensive exhibition of her sculptures will open in the Fall of 2017.
For more than three decades, Silverthorne has taken the studio as her subject. Her work is meticulous and personal, first fashioning everyday items in clay, then casting them in industrial-grade rubber. These objects reflect reality but colored with phosphorus or changed in scale, they retain their uniqueness.
Thus she makes light bulbs, some broken, that fill and spill from a garbage bin; or wire cables, task chairs and shipping crates. Such banal items become metaphors for the inevitability of age and decay, but tempered with humor, hope and humanity.
Silverthorne came of age as an artist when women sculptors not infrequently used Eva Hesse as inspiration and this was true for Silverthorne as well. But her work aligns more closely with the “handmade readymades” of Robert Gober whose sinks and cribs are rooted in memory.
Nature is ever present in her work: dandelions and weeds grow between rubber floorboards, trompe l’oeil sunflowers and flies become still-lifes, her Memento Mori. Since 2007 Silverthorne has been making a functional rubber crate for each sculpture that, upon reaching its destination and contents unpacked, becomes part of the exhibition.
The program at MARC STRAUS, which began with mostly international artists new to the market, has increasingly added to the roster mid and late career pioneering artists, such as Hermann Nitsch and Sandro Chia. Marc Straus remarks, “Jeanne Silverthorne is a sculptor we have revered as collectors for decades. Her work is quiet and poignant, counterpoints to the severity of male formalism: Serra, Judd, and Andre. Her subjects are imbued with humility.”
Silverthorne (b. 1950, Philadelphia, United States) received a BA and MA from Temple University and has had numerous one-person exhibitions. She was represented by McKee Gallery for twenty years. Her museum exhibitions include PS 1, New York, the ICA, Philadelphia, and Whitney Museum, New York. Her work is included in many major museum collections, including the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea; MoMA, New York; MFA Houston, SFMOMA, CA and the Whitney Museum in New York. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
