A PRIORI

Elise Adibi

19 November – 19 December, 2010

SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “A PRIORI,” an exhibition of new oil paintings by ELISE ADIBI. The show is on view from 19 November – 19 December. This is Adibi’s first solo show in New York. There will be a reception for the artist at the gallery on Friday, 19 November, from 6-8 PM.

“’From what comes before’: Elise Adibi’s paintings treat certain material facts as prerequisite, conditions of procedural constraint. The weave of canvas provides the fundamental grid, for instance, and so manifests the fundamentally abstract order intrinsic to any painting. In a number of recent pieces the color of raw canvas has induced recourse to canvas-colored paint, too. But a priori conditions, whether set by materials or by the artist herself, are rarely predictive. Aleatory marks, smudges or slips, register as no less important here than the elaboration of the canvas’s surface according to the strictures of mathematical pattern. These marks of the hand are examples not of what may be inherent to such a surface but rather of what may be inevitable to it—examples of ‘what comes during.’

Meanwhile, ‘from what comes later’: If the a priori bespeaks all possible experience, the a posteriori bespeaks the vagaries of actual experience. Indeed, experience accrues to these paintings, as conspicuously flat as they are. The light is different today from yesterday; tomorrow adjacent colors, continuing to act upon one another, will create a sudden, shimmering third. No two encounters disclose the same work, which proves to be both the reality and the realism of Adibi’s abstractions. A painting derives from a set of fixed terms but then reveals itself as too live, too full of the capacity for change, to fix the terms of our own perceptual capacities.” –Kate Nesin

Elise Adibi was born in Boston, MA and lives and works in New York. In 2008 she received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and in 2007 the Terra Foundation awarded her a residency in Giverny France. She has been an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Brooklyn College and she has shown at the Hosfelt Gallery in New York. In 2009-2010 she curated the exhibition Gold in Braddock. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007. She also has a BA from Swarthmore College in Philosophy and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.