Press Release

CLAUDIA KEEP
Somehow, Somewhere, Someway
13 September – 12 October 2024
Galerie Marguo, 4 rue des Minimes, 75003 Paris“To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing” - Philip Guston
Galerie Marguo is delighted to present Somehow, Somewhere, Someway, Brooklyn-based artist Claudia Keep’s
Paris debut, on view from 13 September to 12 October 2024.
Working from a catalog of photos taken throughout the artist’s daily routines and perambulations, Claudia Keeppaints fleeting moments excised from everyday life, rescuing their emotional charge from the stream of time. Keep’s
first solo exhibition with Galerie Marguo and in Paris features paintings of such quotidian scenes, highlighting themagnificence of these micro-experiences. Her practice probes what the French Oulipian writer, Georges Perec,
termed the ‘infra-ordinary’: the myriad infinitesimal moments, versus the “the big event, the untoward, theextraordinary,”1 that ultimately constitutes life and suffuses it with meaning. The artist likens her paintings to thecinematic experience of staring out the window of a moving car while listening to a poignant song, feeling oneselfawash in the heightened drama of the hyperreal, the minor event–the soupy space where our most intimate andbanal thoughts are projected like a voiceover onto the glowing blur of city lights whooshing by.
Keep titles her paintings by the date and timestamp of the pictures they are based on, followed by descriptive
captions of their contents, melding her individual subjectivity into the larger standardization, or quantification, oftime’s passage. While reminiscent of On Kawara’s conceptual Date Paintings, Keep is primarily concerned with thesensuous and somatic. Her inspiration is drawn from film and street photography, William Eggleston’s Polaroids forexample, that are deceptively nonchalant yet pulse with the truth and directness of life. Referencing Baudelaire,
Keep’s images seek to “extract the eternal from the ephemeral” by recovering in her compositions “the light andmovement of life” that defines “the present.”212Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Writings, ed. John Strouck, 2008.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863.

Rendered in sumptuous strokes of oil on Masonite, her paintings experiment with ways of conveying what the actof looking feels like. Intimate in scale, they physically beckon the viewer closer, inviting them to infuse these familiar
yet generic scenes with their own experience and memories. The tactility of Keep’s tableaux, achieved by a rapid
wet-on-wet application technique, further extends this line of inquiry. In works such as July 30th 6:43 PM, Waves,2023–a glittering canopy of refracted sun rays on a lake’s meniscus–the repetition of shapes and colors tip into
meditative abstraction, transforming familiar figuration into a formalist exercise of colors and patterns.
The works on view can be parsed into distinct temporal categories: anticipation (the twinkling condensation of an
untouched negroni against a glistening zinc bar), suspension (like the flare of sun rays breaking through the forest,a bolt of lightning mid-strike, insects caught in rare moments of repose), and trace, (the quiet avalanche of rumpled
bed sheets, or a plate of orange rinds), wherein the main action, or event, is implied but not shown. This recalls thealchemy of the cinematic technique of montage: the juxtaposition of two inert frames that produce a third in themind of the viewer, in which the action takes place.
Unfurling across the gallery space like a spool of 35mm film, Somehow, Somewhere, Someway evokes the diaristic
quality of a scrapbook or home movie, albeit one in which the central through-line of the narrator is absent, making
room for the viewer to play the protagonist of these paintings, to recognize the majesty of minor moments andpossess them ourselves.

About the artist
Claudia Keep’s paintings reveal the intimate complexity of everyday moments. Composed of soft lines and shapes,
they convey impressions of the ordinary that are curiously lucid. Ranging from scenes passing by like the somber
warmth of a bedroom light, crumpled sheets rippled in the form of an avalanche, or the mesmerizing glare of abutterfly's wings-Keep renders these moments sacred. This record of detail rescues the humblest of beauty frominvisibility, by its nature an invitation to look more closely.
Claudia Keep was born in 1993 in Low Moor, Virginia and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received
her BFA from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.
Her upcoming and recent exhibitions include Chateau La Coste, FR (2024 upcoming, group); Galerie Marguo,Paris, FR (2024, solo); 1226 Gallery, Dallas, TX (2024, solo); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023, solo) andMARCH, New York, NY (2023, solo). Keep has also exhibited at Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, CA), Venus OverManhattan (New York, NY), Fortnight Institute (New York, NY), and The Painting Center (New York, NY). Keep’swork has been featured in The Paris Review, Plant Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine, among others.

Press InquiriesCopyright and Courtesy Credits

Maud Cartronmaud@marguo.com+33 7 66 14 91 25

Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Marguo#ClaudiaKeep#ClaudiaKeepParis#SomehowSomewhereSomeway@galeriemarguo
marguo.com

September 7th, 10:06 AM, Red Admiral on the Sidewalk, 2023
Signed and dated on reverse
Oil on masonite panel
20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in)
22.3 x 27.4 cm (8.8 x 10.8 in) framed