Forum 67

Cathy Wilkes (Irish, b. 1966) creates work that is empathetic, visceral, and exposed, often generated by shared human experiences such as the emotional states of loss and life’s cycles of birth and death.

This is the first solo exhibition in an American museum to explore the full range of the artist’s work, resulting in a complex new installation of accumulated objects, figures, and paintings. In her studio, Wilkes creates both her paintings and sculptures using a process of continuous and interconnected labor and experimentation, striving to channel the invisible forces and the connections that define intimate relationships. She has conceived the individual works in the gallery as a whole experience, emphasizing the connection between each element and its placement within the room.

In the installation, Wilkes connects a personal, introverted sense of memory and experience to a more public expression of past, shared experiences. Low, table-like platforms collect her paintings, and collages alongside figurative sculptures and objects that were dug up from the tragic World War I battle of the Somme, which took place in France in 1918. While the sculptures and semi-abstract paintings might evoke old soldiers or burned battle fields, the final works remain open to projection and the meanings that accumulate over the process of their making. At the root of these displays is Wilkes’s interest in an undefined “ancient force,” potentially traumatic moments of loss or buried memories, and moments when, as the artist describes it, “a body becomes emptied.”

The paintings in the exhibition were relatively new to Wilkes’s practice, as her paintings are normally incorporated within her sculptural installations. While her canvases gained new levels of independence, their relationship to her sculptures—in her artistic process and in the way audiences experience the works—remains important. The paintings live long lives in the studio—they’re worked, set aside, often scrubbed and worked again. Using complex color combinations, abstraction, and an intuitive geometry interspersed with figurative and landscape references, they conjure the same kinds of memory, states of vulnerability, softness, and expressions of life’s deeply felt psychic states that permeate her sculptures.