NEWS:

Upcoming fall exhibitions at Figge Museum in Davenport, IA and Daum Museum in Sedalia, MO

Here and Now: Contemporary Feminism opens June 28 at Strohl Art Center at Chautauqua Institution, NY

Listen to my interview with Justin Key for the podcast Artist Proof on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

contact:   tiffanycalvert @ gmail

the work

Tiffany Calvert’s work brings painting into sustained dialogue with digital image media, print, video, and machine learning. Her work combines old and new technologies, including oil painting, buon fresco, 3D modeling, code manipulation, and artificial intelligence. Calvert treats painting not as an isolated self-referential medium but as an indicator of our visual paradigm and a site where broader systems of authority can be interrupted and challenged. Her works use the histories of still life and abstraction to address contemporary image circulation, mediation, reproduction, and algorithmic logic.

“For artists of Calvert’s generation, the dilemma of making paintings after its “death” (starting in the 1960s) and “return” (starting in the 1980s) is to choose which legacy to embrace, since each position would seem to exclude the other.

Yet as I see it, she recognizes each of these divergent positions as part of her heritage, and that neither has triumphed over the other, which connects her to artists as different as Burckhardt, Pieter Schoolwerth, and Wendy White (who also earned her MFA from Rutgers), as well as established figures like David Reed, William Tillyer, and William T. Wiley, and artists virtually unknown in America, such as the great Brazilian artist, Leda Catunda. In all of their work, you encounter divisions grinding together with tectonic pressure, never resolving into a unitary whole but never falling apart…

Calvert’s paintings are palimpsests, archeological digs, engagements with art history, improvisational riffs, and fractured views. They wrestle with painting’s dual legacy without settling on an answer — a refusal that fills her works with painterly pizzazz. It is a refusal that connects Calvert to another Dutch artist, Willem de Kooning.”

• from John Yau, Painting’s Divided Legacy, Hyperallergic March 7, 2020.