Astrid Dick: Kamikaze Ponzi
October 18 - November 17, 2024
Opening reception October 18, 6 - 9 pm
From large to small scale painting, video, zines and installation, Astrid Dick engages with the possibilities of contemporary painting through her bold and complex mix of “high” and “low” art, her mastery of oil paint, and her exuberant use of color, non-traditional materials and supports such as discarded foam, sequins, and glitter, simultaneously embracing and subverting her love of modernism and the history of painting.
In this high-wire act between improvisation, intentionality and intuition, she combines color, gesture, and touch, to create a scaffolding of formal rigor charged with implied poetic narratives. By virtue of her boldness in mixing styles, her promiscuity of materials and her ownership of what was previously the male canon, her paintings are neither male nor female but rather in the voice of a libertine. For example, in a painting like Piétiner (Complementaries for P.M.), Dick references the use of a soft geometry (citing Mondrian and Heilmann) and unexpectedly combines it with gestural abstraction.
In the catalogue for her recent one-person exhibition Ne Pleure Pas Paillettes in Paris, painter and poet Hugo Pernet writes: “It takes a certain courage to refuse the “signature” effects so common in abstract painting. This courage implies the acceptance of not being loved, understood, recognized. To advance with the spirit of adventure, towards “a not-knowing knowing,” as John of the Cross wrote in his mystical poems. To find the determination and strength to feel legitimate, to reread a history written by men. Astrid Dick’s painting is both a fight and a game. This is why we always find something a little painterly about it: the painting is a concrete object that tells its own materialization, and in this story-in-acts are grafted parasitic emotions and thoughts, flakes of subjectivity fallen into this volcano in formation.”
That is her gift, that she can take all of these things, processing them so quickly, making them her own, a freedom of expression, a tangible space for all of us to enter.
-Michael David
KAMIKAZE PONZI
Move paint around.
Deal with gravity.
Don’t impose your rules ex ante.
Trust the closed system of painting.
There are enough constraints in being you.
Set your framework as the sorbet between dishes to cleanse the palate.
Trou Normand.
Remain alien.
You are inescapably yourself.
Conspicuously dee-Light.
Beware of symmetry.
Your intuition is not empty rhetoric because you beat the hell out of it.
In space, One Composition, Various Tableaux.
It can totally fail.
L’éternel retour.
Ou détour.
Kamikaze.
Ponzi.
To join Little Richard
- Astrid Dick August 2024
Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Astrid Dick has been working and living in Paris for the last two decades. Dick has been a recipient of the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship at Yaddo and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others, and shown her work through solo and group shows in Europe, the US and Argentina, such as the Grand Palais in Paris and the Manoir de la Ville de Martigny, Switzerland. Most recently, she has shown at Moments Artistiques in Paris, at MDavid & Co. Gallery and at Below Grand Gallery in New York, at Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, and her work was reviewed by John Yau in Hyperallergic and by David Rhodes in The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She holds a PhD in Economics from MIT.