K8 HARDY
A New Painting
SEPT 20 - OCT 25, 2020

K8 Hardy takes medium specificity to the max in ​A New Painting, a​ n exhibition thatpromises and indeed comprises a singular work on something like canvas: ​March(2020). But Hardy, an artist of broad ability and humor, has never done one thing at
a time and is not about to start. Naturally, this painting is one that does the work ofa dozen.
In preparation for ​March, ​Hardy made nearly thirty studies on paper and fabric,working with gravity as her studio assistant to perfect her mistakes. Beset by color,hands tie-dyed—she must have looked like a feminist Helen Frankenthaler. Stain
being an anagram of ‘insta,’ the irony has never been richer. Hardy’s colors are
redolent of a delicate and frankly imperiled world. Her palette is alien, alchemical,chemical. Yellow like Gatorade. Grass green, bluing to fungal. A kind of neon peach.
And in the center, a shade so dark it absorbs all the others. Jules Olitski: “Mypictures are only colors sprayed into the air and suspended there.”
If ​March ​were only colors it would be beautiful, but it is also a shape. TheGreenbergians sought to turn ground into air, so that figure, form, and ground wereindivisible. Hardy skews this consummation. Her ground is in a sense a figure—it is afabrication based upon a recognizable, banal object which happens to be white andclean and tightly woven. And in fact the figure swallows up the content, forcing paintto take its shape, as opposed to the way Frankenthaler, Olitski et al turned fabricinto another part of paint. We are reminded of Claes Oldenburg’s early soft
sculptures, in which unmentionable objects are blown up to statement size. His
reaction to the flatness, what he saw as the boringness of AbEx. But as a sculpture,March w​ ould be very flat, whereas as a painting, it’s hyperbolic. The particular shapeof the ‘canvas,’ as well as its many absorbent layers, reinforce its status as lesssurface, perhaps, than receptacle. Frank Stella: “A sculpture is just a painting cut out
and stood up somewhere.” Hardy’s painting is sculptural to the degree that, say,Jackson Pollock’s ​Cut-Out ​(1948—1950) is a sculpture, but it is also thoroughly laid
down and it is even more wall-bound than a canvas, since its softness makes it
impossible to casually lean.
You could hang it on a ceiling, though. Something about the way the paint is appliedmakes the viewers—us—feel like we’re the ones on the ground, lying supine and alittle dizzy after a hike. Sky changing rapidly above, tie-dyed if you squint throughthe trees. Clouds crumbling like plaster. And that thing in the middle, a kind of
inkblot betokening the inability of a genius to slow down, is like the black blotch you
sometimes see after looking at the sun. There is a reflection of the eye in all this, butespecially in that blotch and the way it also looks like a pupil, enlarged. Texture
helps: the anti-leak channels of the pad become upper and lower lids. Green is nicefor an iris. But then… there is the eerie feeling that, although it conforms to thenotion of a landscape, and is hung like one, the eye in ​March ​sees nothing on thehorizon.
Hardy, with her expected flair, has created in ​March ​a thickly layered pastiche inwhich the lessons of modernism as well as the ethics of pluralism are absorbed. Thisis a painting about art history that deserves to be called new, which is to say that it
resists periodization. ☺

-Sarah Nicole Prickett, Nicole Eisenman