November 11, 2021 - January, 2022
Press Release (PDF)
A catalogue with an essay by Felix Salmon accompanies the exhibition.
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Marisa Newman Projects is pleased to present new paintings and sculpture by New York based artist Charlotta Westergren. The show’s title Domicile refers to a legal notion of residence and the current situation of statelessness. The interiors in the large-scale paintings come, sometimes from memories of the artist’s family homes, sometimes from iconic architecture, and sometimes both. All the works are emptied out – the absence of human presence is haunting and the feeling of loss palpable.
Those Who Toil In This Place, combines classical Swedish architecture with French heroic realism, both recalling places in which the artist spent time as a child. At the center of the painting is an open door – an invitation to enter. Yet, the next room has a firmly shut door – giving the viewer mixed messages. The title also mysterious – referencing both a biblical phrase and the Jean-François Millet painting “The Gleaners”- asking the viewer to consider if in “toiling” we still end up as dust and ashes.
Carolyn Glasoe Bailey June 25, 1969 – November 16, 2015 a work that memorialized Westergren’s dear friend who died young and quite suddenly. Again the painting offers us an open door, but we are lead into a bedroom with a single bed – appearing like a casket with its white shroud.
Farnsworth House, another interior, but enclosed in the glass and steel of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, it seems to appear that we are in a landscape full of trees and foliage. The house in this painting, still without people, feels more alive with its proximity to nature. Yet, the irony is that this home was indeed uninhabitable due to the outdoor elements invading the space through the wondrous windows.
Because of their large scale and dedication to the detail – these hyper-realistic paintings almost erase the boundaries of the physical space where the viewers become the main subjects and interpreters. These paintings are richly nuanced with cultural and historical references and pose open-ended questions about the historical narratives and mythologies around the past.
Literally and figuratively illuminating the spaces is, Gardening 4, an exuberant and joyous sculptural chandelier, comprised of colorful glass flowers, petals, insects and fruits. It pays homage to the artist’s love for the Flemish art and -as in its best tradition- acts as an affirmation of the beauty and the magic of the materiality of the everyday.
Charlotta Westergren was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She studied architecture and worked in the field in San Francisco and NYC. Her first exhibition was in 2002 at the Dee Glasoe Gallery in New York. Since then, she's shown at Mary Goldman Gallery, Bellwether Gallery, Arin Contemporary, and Patrick Painter. She has been in museum shows at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, and the Fort Worth Modern. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Dagens Nyheter, Art in America, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Modern painters, ART PAPERS among many others. She directs her own art school in New York City, Downtown Painting.
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Essay by Felix Salmon
Architects don’t walk into a room like most other people. While an art collector might automatically gravitate to the art on the walls, or someone with a bad back might look for a suitable chair, an architect will immediately assess the theater of the space. How do sightlines reveal themselves? What does the eye — and the human body — want to navigate and explore? What are the feelings provoked by the design?
Charlotta Westergren, an architect by training, has spent recent years exploring the theater of interiors in her meticulously-constructed paintings. Her canvases are theatrical themselves — oversized statements, initially overwhelming, that unfurl over time with gestures both big and tiny.
Domiciles features three such paintings: Carolyn Glasoe Bailey, June 25, 1969 — November 16, 2015 (2017); Those Who Toil In This Place (2020); and Farnsworth House (2021). Each is painted in oil on linen, on a scale of 60″ x 72″, and the three together demonstrate Westergren’s protean range of abilities.
The first painting, titled, in memoriam, after Westergren’s mentor and patron, depicts Carl Larsson’s house in Sundborn, Sweden — a house instantly recognizable to Swedes. Over the years, the home has cemented itself in the popular imagination as the archetypal Swedish residence. Larsson was much more than just a painter; his house became a touchstone of interior design, to the point at which Swedes to this day expect their summer cottages to look much like what we see in Westergren’s painting.
Westergren’s depiction is reasonably faithful to the house, but not slavishly so. On the wall hang not Larsson’s paintings but rather a painting of Westergren and Glasoe Bailey as children, as well as a painting by Francis Picabia that the two of them liberated from a gallery that was refusing to give Westergren money she was owed. The colors are deeper than in real life; the painted decorative touches on the wall are more obvious, and the curtain that normally hides the rear bedroom has disappeared, to reveal a luminous light turquoise wall.
Westergren tends to reserve her most loving touches for certain details — the reflection of light off the small blue cupboard next to the stove, for instance, or the ecstatic red flower painted on the wall atop the door jamb, from which spring buds of life. Those details can also jump across paintings: the perspective-skewed angles of the bedroom wall in Sweden are echoed in the similar shape and skew of the celadon ceiling in the Farnsworth House, while the reflections on the battered cupboard door have the same shimmer as the light reflecting off Mies van der Rohe’s polished, yet equally battered, marble floor. This is where Westergren’s facture begins to feel three-dimensional — you begin to experience the texture of the materials, while maybe squinting a little as the light hits your eye.
In Those Who Toil In This Place, such verisimilitudinous touches are less obvious, while the painting itself is more overtly theatrical. This is an interior that doesn’t exist, an architectural portmanteau combining a Swedish manor house, in the foreground, with a French interior visible through the kind of doorway that feels like a welcoming, gesturing arm. Enter here, says the door, and admire the large painting hanging on the back wall — one of those earthy peasant scenes you might find from Breughel. Along the way, check out the walls in both rooms, painted with mildly disconcerting trompe l’oeil drapery — oh, and, of course, pay attention to the ceiling, popping with a plethora of pastels, once again dialed up from the original source. This is a painting one traverses. The viewer moves around the canvas — she can feel herself looking up; down; around the corner.
Farnsworth House, as befits its architectural pedigree, receives the most respect of the trio — although even there Mies’s legendary straight lines are rotated into a sharply perspectival framing, with the corner of the building taking an uncharacteristic position at the center of the composition, and a mildly unfamiliar child’s-eye point of view allowing for a significant expanse of blue sky. Nature’s appearance startles, outside the carefully arranged interior, the trees of Illinois showing off maximum sumptuousness to anybody who might venture into this space of perfectionist architectural austerity.
The three paintings are all interiors without people, but they’re all portraits of aspirational architecture, and, thereby, portraits of the people who commission and inhabit such spaces — the unseen yet omnipresent architects and patrons who design, navigate, and fulfill these rooms. Westergren’s installation places the viewer in the middle of all three works, seeing, imagining, feeling a different house each time they turn, a serial visitor rather than a familiar homeowner.
These works dominate the gallery walls; their proximity, both to the viewer and to each other, is heightened by an asymmetrical brass chandelier that forces movement and interrupts both sightlines and contemplation. There’s an essay on the politics of architecture here, but it’s delivered quietly. As with all theater, these paintings’ meaning only emerges with time, and as with all good art, that meaning never stands still. Westergren’s canvases demand and repay attention and attentiveness. These works are painted slowly, with difficulty, and need to be read that way too. Everybody who does so ends up richly rewarded.
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