Elaine Reichek exhibition bridges 50 years of her career, with a combination of recent text-based work and historic early work from the 70s. She has had recent solo museum shows at the Secession, Vienna; the Aldrich, and The Jewish Museum, NY and has adhered to a very rigorously conceptual approach to making work, with the common thread being a relationship to craft, or domestic techniques: from hand-embroidery to knitting. There are several examples of her work currently on view in show Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
ELAINE REICHEK: Between the Needle and the Book
January 18th – March 7th, 2020
McClain Gallery is pleased to present artist Elaine Reichek’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Between the Needle and the Book. Occupying both of the gallery’s spaces, this two-part show introduces Reichek’s five-decade career like a pair of bookends, juxtaposing her most recent text-based embroideries with sewn paintings and fabric works from the 1970s.
The second part of Between the Needle and the Book, installed in the west gallery, focuses on Reichek’s earliest mature works from the 1970s. A decade prior, at Brooklyn College, Reichek had been deeply influenced by her studies with Ad Reinhardt, who taught that every element in a work of art must be accounted for and that self-imposed limitations could yield great variety.