Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Jackie Saccoccio & Chris Garofalo

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present Spectral Hole, Jackie Saccoccio’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Through vibrant large-scale paintings and works on paper, Saccoccio’s improvisational practice examines the tension between gestural force and the fusion of color. Employing a series of controlled accidents, Saccoccio applies wet swaths of paint to her surface, aggressively tipping, turning, and pressing multiple canvases atop one another. This technique creates vast fields of overlaid colors, smudges, drips, and stains that spread like living, breathing entities across the surface of the work.

The exhibition, comprised of six large paintings on linen, is charged with implosive energy. Through the manipulation of surface and material, Saccoccio creates condensed networks of pigment that are both centralized and dispersed. Immersive in scale, the content is at once organized and chaotic, digitized and organic. Bold colors cascade into bright, delicate hues within a fragmented picture plane that refuses definitive identification. Titled Portrait or Place, these works dissipate into vistas and vortexes, alluding to the presence of both body and location. Saccoccio draws inspiration from a variety of art historical figures including George Seurat, Lee Bontecou, Jackson Pollack, Elizabeth Murray, and Sigmar Polke to create entrancing, dense, and diaphanous fields that draw the viewer in, insisting quiet contemplation to determine what is concealed and what is revealed by the surface of the painting.

Jackie Saccoccio (b.1963) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and a MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. She has exhibited at galleries and institutions internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include 11R and Van Doren Waxter, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; Brand New Gallery, Milan; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and she has participated in significant group shows at The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; MCA Chicago; and MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL, among others. She is an American Academy in Rome Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow and Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and is the recipient of an Art Production Fund / Claude Monet Foundation Artists in Giverny residency; the 2015 Artadia NADA Award; and the Stein Prize from MOCA Jacksonsville. Saccoccio’s work is included in multiple public collections including the Booth School at the University of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; MCA Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; MOCA Jacksonville; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; the Rose Museum of Art, and many others. Jackie Saccoccio lives and works in Connecticut and New York. 

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is delighted to present PRECIOUS FRAGMENTS exquisite longing, Chris Garofalo’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. For over thirty years, she has worked with clay to create ceramic sculptures inspired by the flora and fauna of the world’s oceans, desserts, and jungles. Garofalo applies multiple glazes to render authentic-looking skins or shells, so distinct that they appear to have grown themselves. The forms and patterns might recall creatures that exist in life, but all of the sculptures are born out of Garofalo’s imagination and transcend standard scientific classification. Theories of evolution and metamorphosis are fundamental to Garofalo’s practice, and as such, the sculptures come alive in their environments, breathing, stirring, and continuing to grow.

PRECIOUS FRAGMENTS exquisite longing features over 50 forms displayed in apothecarial jars and glass cases reminiscent of natural history museums, recalling the vast collections of objects found as early as the 16th century in the cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammer of rulers, aristocrats, members of the merchant class, and the early pracitioners of science in Europe. A precursor to the modern museum, these bodies of specimens and oddities attempted to tell stories about the natural world through categorization, describing microcosms as a “theatre of the world, and a memory theater.”[1] This historical, scientific, artistic, and cultural reenactment offers a future past designed to help us recognize our own present, where human arrogance and folly have put our most precious fragments at the very brink of extinction, evoking an exquisite longing for a paradise still in the process of being lost.

Chris Garofalo (b, Springfield, Illinois) earned a BFA from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. She has exhibited her ceramic sculptures since 1991, holding exhibitions at galleries and institutions internationally including the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago; Foundazione Mazzullo, Taormino, Sicily; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon; R & Company, New York; Bureau Gallery, New York; Mathew Marks Gallery, New York; and Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburg, among others. In 2007, she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptor Award. Chris Garofalo has lived and worked in Chicago since 1980.

Jackie Saccoccio: Spectral Hole

Chris Garofalo: PRECIOUS FRAGMENTS exquisite longing

December 15, 2017 - January 27, 2018