Marcia Hafif — Beginning Again

Marcia Hafif — Beginning Again

Feb. 27 — April 24, 2021

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Red Medium, January 25, 1974, 1974, Oil on canvas, 84h x 78w in.

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Red Medium, January 25, 1974, detail view

Marcia Hafif, Ultramarine Blue, 1995, Oil on canvas, 18h x 18w in.

Marcia Hafif, Ultramarine Blue, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Ultramarine Blue, detail view

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Pozzuoli Red, Nov 22, 1973, 1973, Oil on canvas, 22h x 22w in.

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Pozzuoli Red, Nov 22, 1973, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Pozzuoli Red, Nov 22, 1973, detail view

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Red Ochre, Nov 24, 1973, 1973, Oil on canvas, 22h x 22w in.

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Red Ochre, Nov 24, 1973, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Red Ochre, Nov 24, 1973, detail view

Marcia Hafif, Light Green/Phthalocyanine Blue, 2003, Oil on canvas, 16h x 16w in.

Marcia Hafif, Light Green/Phthalocyanine Blue, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Light Green/Phthalocyanine Blue, detail view

Marcia Hafif, Asphaltum/Indian Yellow, 2003, Oil on canvas, 16h x 16w in.

Marcia Hafif, Asphaltum/Indian Yellow, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Asphaltum/Indian Yellow, detail view

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 4 parts, 22h x 22w in. each

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), individual view of Indigo

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), detail view of Indigo

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), individual view of Phthalocyanine Green

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), detail view of Phthalocyanine Green

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), individual view of Alizarin Lake

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), detail view of Alizarin Lake

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), individual view of Phthalocyanine Blue

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue), detail view of Phthalocyanine Blue

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Yellow Medium, Oct 2, 1973, 1973, Oil on canvas, 22h x 22w in.

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Yellow Medium, Oct 2, 1973, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Yellow Medium, Oct 2, 1973, detail view

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 4 parts, 18h x 18w in. each

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), individual view of Chromatic Black

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), detail view of Chromatic Black

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), individual view of Vine Black

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), detail view of Vine Black

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), individual view of Violet Grey

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), detail view of Violet Grey

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), individual view of Silver

Marcia Hafif, Shade Paintings: Group 10 (Chromatic Black, Vine Black, Violet Grey, Silver), detail view of Silver

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Naples Yellow Light, Jan 8, 1974, 1974, Oil on canvas, 22h x 22w in.

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Naples Yellow Light, Jan 8, 1974, angled view

Marcia Hafif, Mass Tone Painting: Naples Yellow Light, Jan 8, 1974, detail view

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Untitled, c. 1968, Acrylic and spray paint on cardboard, 22 3/8h x 18 7/8w in. (artwork), 24 1/2h x 21w in. (framed)

Beginning Again, Installation View

Marcia Hafif, Untitled, c. 1968, Acrylic and spray paint on cardboard, 22 3/8h x 18 7/8w in. (artwork), 24 1/2h x 21w in. (framed)

Marcia Hafif, Untitled, c. 1968, Acrylic, spray paint, and graphite on paper, 22 3/8h x 18 7/8w in. (artwork), 24 1/2h x 21w in. (framed)

Marcia Hafif, Untitled, c. 1968, Acrylic and spray paint on cardboard, 22 3/8h x 18 7/8w in. (artwork), 24 1/2h x 21w in. (framed)

PRESS RELEASE

“Monochrome […] is open and receptive and “empty;” it is non-specific and changing according to time, location, and viewer.”

RUSCHMAN is pleased, proud, and humbled to present a solo exhibition of works by the preeminent figurehead of monochromatic painting and the Radical Painting movement, Marcia Hafif. This selection of works explores the depth and richness of a six-decade career dedicated to the act of applying (mostly) a single color of paint to a chosen surface. The earliest works on view were made c. 1968, at the end of the artist’s 8-year stay in Rome before returning the to US. The exhibition tracks several other major bodies of work from that period forward, from the Mass Tone paintings of the 1970’s through the Shade Paintings of the 2010’s, which were being made until the artist’s passing in 2018.

"The figure had moved off the ground; now the painting itself was a figure on the ground of the world around it."

Hafif’s Mass Tone paintings from the early 1970’s encompass a majority of the exhibition. For these works, pigment was ground by hand into linseed oil and applied to a canvas surface in short vertical strokes from left to right, top to bottom. The color vibrates and fades, oscillating between opacity and transparency. The hand of the artist is deliberate, methodical, and present. The paintings are objects with warmth and character.

On an east-facing wall, Mass Tone Painting: Red Ochre, Nov 24, 1973 seems a soft caliginous field of matte paint when viewed from the left. Move to the opposite side of the canvas and the northern light catches every stroke of the artist’s hand, turning the surface into a deluge of vertical hatch marks in rich earthy red.

The massive Mass Tone Painting: Cadmium Red Medium, January 25, 1974 invites you close to surround your field of vision in a color that turns almost magenta in this winter light. A constellation of minuscule white spots comes into focus as evidence of the paint drying into tighter molecules, exposing bits of the primed canvas structure behind the red curtain.

“What is there when we have taken everything away? What happens when there is very little to see? Painting has long flirted with emptiness.”

The Glaze Paintings and Double Glaze Paintings from the mid-1990’s and early 2000’s take the approach of the Mass Tone canvases and extend both the pigment as well as the mark of paint application. Oil pigment is combined with a liberal mixture of Damar varnish and turpentine, and glazed over the canvas surface in layers. The colors here glow like stained glass. In Ultramarine Blue (1995), each stroke extends several inches and, perhaps inadvertently, curves ever so slightly. These strokes lose individual definition as the layers overlap, and the result is a liquid square of lustrous blue deep sea. Light Green / Phthalocyanine Blue (2003) is a mossy vernal mist of marks. Where the top glazed layers of humid green were firmly applied with a hard brush, the blue peers through from behind the bristled scratches with a reminder to cool down.

“We can examine monochromatic thinking and some of its manifestations, seeing just how dissimilar two monochromes can be and how much in the way of imagery they can encompass.”

For the Shade Paintings, Hafif’s final sequence in what she would come to call “The Inventory” (her 46-year exploration of color and material in painting), oil colors were selected and mixed with a small amount of black to discover what shade might result from this minimal shift in tone. These paintings are then arranged in groups of four or six canvases. In Shade Paintings: Group 11 (Indigo, Phthalocyanine Green, Alizarin Lake, Phthalocyanine Blue) (2014), it seems as if a bit of alchemy has taken place, where a few drops of black pigment have created colors arguably more vibrant than the originals. And it is the colors that are intentionally center stage in the Shade Paintings; the brush strokes applied with an elongated evenness that sits back and plays a supporting role in a color journey across multiple surfaces.

“The work is quiet, contemplative, and, as I have suggested, even meditative. This is a most difficult quality to discuss. We are used to talking in terms of materials and formal elements, but not of subjective content. Perhaps we feel that too much discussion dissipates the fact of it. We are trying to talk about an experience that is essentially personal.”

So, on a personal note then (and if you’ve read this far, you’re exactly the kind of audience I intend a personal note for), Marcia was one of the most generous artists and people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. In 2011, a couple years out of my Undergraduate education, I was operating a not-for-profit gallery in Cincinnati, OH with my partner Matt and three of our closest friends. We wrote to Marcia, having never met or spoken with her, cautiously hoping that she might be willing to loan us a small painting for a group show we were organizing. She wrote back and asked if she could do a solo exhibition instead. In no small way did this help steer my life to where I am now.

The abundance of possibility that Marcia lived her life with seeped into those she collaborated with. I’m incredibly lucky to count myself among them, both in 2011 and now. The paintings carry the same energy; stripped down to what constitutes the object of a painting (paint applied to a surface). A seemingly small bit of information that is endlessly giving.

“Beginning Again” is of course the title of Marcia’s oft-referenced (and above quoted) essay from 1978. As we potentially come out of a pandemic-lifestyle in the near future and we collectively look for ways to begin again, these paintings become a map for a world that feels stripped down but ceaselessly generative.

—all quotes above from Marcia Hafif, Beginning Again, ArtForum, Sept. 1978

Marcia Hafif — Beginning Again

Marcia Hafif — Beginning Again Feb. 27 — April 24, 2021

Marcia Hafif — Beginning Again

Feb. 27 — April 24, 2021