Featuring the work of Liz Collins! BOOTH #1007 http://www.springbreakartshow.com/sb-new-york-city/
The maximalist impulse is subversive by nature; excessive and decadent. Not only does it flout bourgeois notions of taste ala “less is more”, but it also flagrantly reconfigures them. Jean Genet brilliantly summed this up in The Thief’s Journal when he wrote: “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.” With their electric, bombastic hues and dizzying, graphic patterns, Liz Collins textile works exemplify such harmony. Rejecting the virtues of minimalism for the excesses of pleasure, they refute and underscore the sexist and homophobic origins of the anti-decorative.
Tactile and energetic, the large-scale wall works proposed for Spring Break recall the geometric abstract weavings of the Bauhaus, and the “retinal titillations” of Op-art painting. As always, Collins queers these influences to create an erotically charged language of hot color and frenetic pattern. “When I think about my work related to Maximalism,” she shares, “it makes sense in relation to the dualities I’m preoccupied with like pleasure and pain, chaos and order, restraint and release - extremes that are interdependent.” Tightly woven areas are juxtaposed with luxurious swaths of loose, flowing threads, and allusions to the body erupt amidst the stricture of grids.
As a forerunner to the kind of textile-based practice the contemporary art world is currently obsessed with, Collins has long explored the porous boundaries between painting and sculpture, art and craft, object and performance. Hers is a decadent, maximalist statement on the power of color and form through a distinctly performative, sensual lens.
Jane Ursula Harris