Details:
① Artwork:
Pants on Fire 26
Made from oil, alkyd, and gold leaf, this painting features the word “LIAR” inside a black oval hovering above a mysterious abstract shape. Begun in 2017, the artist’s “Pants on Fire” series has expanded into over 70 small paintings with the word “liar” emblazoned on each. While some possess overt political tones, others get grouped with patterns, objects, or built-up paint. While the paintings can be considered political statements, they also reflect on the illusory act of painting itself.
Squeak Carnwath has cultivated a distinctive blend of disparate 1970s art movements, including new image painting, conceptual art, and process art. Areas of flat color are adrift with abstraction, representational elements, and writing. Carnwath’s idea of process is all-inclusive, combining the physical making of the painting with her thoughts, the world at large, and life in the studio.
Specs:
③ Artist:
An artist whose career has spanned five decades, Carnwath has cultivated a distinctive blend of disparate 1970s art movements, including new image painting, conceptual art, and process art. As such, her paintings speak several languages at once. Areas of flat color are adrift with abstraction, representational elements, and writing—passing thoughts, the news, quips—often partly submerged in the shuffle of erasures and new additions. Despite a loose, improvisational appearance, her artworks contain hidden moments of trompe l’oeil, such as pencil writing and charcoal scribbles rendered in paint. Carnwath’s idea of process is all-inclusive, combining the physical making of the painting with her thoughts, the world at large, and life in the studio.
Squeak Carnwath was born in 1947 in Abington, PA, and lives in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA (1977).
She has mounted solo exhibitions at b.sakata garo in Sacramento, CA (2021); James Harris Gallery in Seattle, WA (2020); and Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City, NY (2019), among others.
Carnwath has been featured in many group exhibitions, including Next to You at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2021); Drawn Together at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York City, NY (2021); One Night in California: Contemporary Nocturnes at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in Bakersfield, CA (2020); and Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA (2020).
The artist has received numerous awards, including an induction into the National Academy of Design (2019), a Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1980), and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985, 1980).
