Exhibition

Salon Highlight:

Jacqueline Surdell
August 6 - September 6, 2023

Featured Artwork

Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a new Salon Highlight with Chicago-based artist Jacqueline Surdell that will be on view from August 6th through September 6th, 2023. In her labor-intensive textile sculptures weaved out of a range of material—from rope, to cord, to fabric and more—Surdell combines the meticulous precision of craft with the unbridled spontaneity of contemporary painting. For her Salon Highlight, the artist has created a series of ten works that seek to articulate small gestures and refine intimate moments within her practice.

Surdell’s years spent as a competitive athlete primed her interest in repetitive, laborious, craft-based practices. Building her wall sculptures demands full body action, employing her body as a weaving shuttle and her hand as brushstroke, while moving in and out of the warp with pounds and yards of industrial rope on self-made mural-sized looms. Although her material is fiber, Surdell’s approach is painterly, manipulating her medium with knotted layers, reducing the material to open the structure, and draping to create volume and texture.

The artist favors massive sculptures—“pieces three times [her] body weight are comfortable for [her]. Glory, sublime, expressive, exhausting, stressful is [her] comfort zone.” Conversely, works smaller in scale require a high level of demand and discipline, for “it is the devilish details, the intimate moments, the micro-movements that prove the most challenging, frustrating, acts. They require much more than work, than labor, than force. Quite the opposite, they require time, and patience.” Surdell metaphorically likens the process of creating these smaller works to the planting of a seed, observing that no amount of external force or artificial intervention can hasten the blooming of a flower or, similarly, the realization of a sculpture; their growth depends solely on time and care. It is the incredible amount of patience harnessed to develop the works that makes them all the more meaningful to Surdell.

Complimentary in their contradictions, the pieces are varied in color palette and design, yet united in their methodologies and process-based nature. In navigating pursuits of material and self discovery, the sculptures have lived many lives within various forms, expanding overtime to exist today as complete objects of beauty and ritual.

Salon Highlight: Jacqueline Surdell is on view from August 6th through September 6th, 2023 at Louis Buhl & Co.