McClain Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work entitled Lightning for Anne Deleporte's online exhibition, which marks her third solo show in Houston.
Deleporte's practice investigates ideas around disappearance, accidents, chance encounters, and found imagery. In her ongoing PhotoFresco series, she isolates found images in newspapers. In a continued investigation of this medium, the Lightning series finds the artist working directly with a newspaper press: utilizing inked rollers and running through uncut lengths of newsprint. After being squeezed between the rollers, the paper wrinkles, bunches, and unevenly accepts ink. The artist then lays out the offcuts to zero in on interesting areas, flattening the wrinkled paper and cutting it down into smaller sheets. Areas once covered by folds are revealed inkless. Sharper delineations start to resemble lightning bolts in a night sky.
While Deleporte's work relies heavily on process, these found drawings are tied intrinsically to abstract painting and the nature of printmaking. There is an elegant friction between the mechanical means and the likeness to natural phenomena in the works. And a touch of the biographical: at age 19, Anne Deleporte was struck by lightning; the poetry of the artist's presence strikes through unexpectedly, as an imprint.
About her series of PhotoFresco pieces, Sara Reisman wrote: "This is no doubt an artist’s filter of the newspaper. Images are privileged over words, suggesting a different kind of literacy. Deleporte’s selective reading creates a sense of order out of the glut of visual and textual matter we face daily, both awake and in dreams... Like the news itself, Deleporte’s paintings leave certain details to the imagination. How one image or detail relates to another is part of the experiment. The real mystery is what Deleporte chooses to cover up."
Anne Deleporte (b. 1960, Corsica, France) is a New York-based, multi-media artist who has always been fascinated with the phenomena of disappearance. True to Deleporte’s signature practice of covering up to reveal, her videos, paintings, and photos engage themes of identity and enigma.
Her large scale murals and video installations have been presented at the Rubin Foundation, New York (2019), FRAC Corsica (2019), Arkad Foundation, Serravezza (2018), the Flag Art Foundation, New York (2017), Musée des Beaux Arts d’Orléans (2016), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2015), Queens Museum (2014), the Dallas Contemporary (2010), Momenta Art NYC (2010), Museo do Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro (2009), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008), and commissioned by NYC Public Arts (2014).
Deleporte has exhibited nationally and internationally at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; PS1 MoMA; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Shanghai Art Museum; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Tang Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; and Musée de la Chasse, Paris. In 2013 she was awarded the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant and she participated in FotoFest, in 2006 and 2014, in Houston.