Julia Dault: Maker’s Mark

Julia Dault is a Canadian-born NY-based artist. Maker’s Mark will be her first solo show in New York since joining Marianne Boesky Gallery two years ago.

For several years, Dault has created abstract paintings and sculptures revealing the processes of their own creation. In Maker’s Mark, she keeps exploring artistic labor, in part through constraining, repeating, or mechanically reproducing her gestures. Similarly, compositional elements she devises for her paintings coexist with those produced industrially: some of her surfaces are created with brushes, others with non-traditional tools like rubber combs, sea sponges, or foam blocks; some paintings’ patterns derive solely from printed fabrics, while others are accompanied by artist-designed frames that complement or contrast what’s on the canvas.

She creates each painting with a novel combination of materials, implements, and set of rules governing its making. Dault’s exploration of the handmade and the industrial continues with one of her sculptures, which are improvised on site and made of hand-bent building materials. For this piece, she combines off-the-shelf materials with Formica specially printed with a pattern from one of the exhibition’s paintings. Other gestures likewise travel across media: a hand-brayered pattern on the walls of one room recurs in the largest canvas featured in the other. One unifying element is Dault’s fascination with patterns, and with the slippages and imperfections that reveal the human origins of what appears mechanical. Another is the search for variety within strict limitations. By devising expressive gestures through rules and reasoning indicative of post-minimal and Conceptual art, Dault is part of a generation of artists revitalizing abstract painting today.