I combine the rigorous structure of weaving with the malleable properties of oil paint to produce tactile, visual, and associative abstractions that question the familiarity of either form. Freed from the rules of the loom, I extrude individual “threads” of oil paint that amass into illusory woven fields, entangled ridges, and corporeal forms that are seemingly pushed, pulled, gathered, and raised by unseen forces. These textured surfaces, formed by the slow accumulation of marks, produce incremental visual “events” that resist painting’s lean toward fixed, two-dimensional imagery.
My influences stem from a modernist matrilineage: the bodily materiality of Eva Hesse’s constructions, Agnes Martin’s devotion to the grid as an infinite improvisational and expressionistic form, Ruth Asawa’s insistence on meaning in handwork, Ann Truitt’s assertion of formalism’s relationship to the personal. Following their legacy, I explore the power of abstract painting’s capacity to communicate embodied knowledge and experience. At their core, the paintings activate metaphorical meaning through visual and textural perception, foregrounding materiality and the experience of touch and presence in our increasingly digitized lives.
Danielle Mysliwiec holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at
C O U N T Y (Palm Beach), Novella Gallery, New York, Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, and others. Selected fairs and group exhibitions include Untitled Art Fair, (Miami) Asya Geisberg Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art, Mixed Greens Gallery and Transmitter Gallery (NY), Rockelmann & (Berlin), C o u n t y (Palm Beach), Heiner Contemporary (Washington, DC), Baer Ridgway Exhibitions (San Francisco), and The Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design (Asheville, NC). Her paintings have been featured and reviewed in publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Maake Magazine, Art Fag City, The Washington Post, B’more Art, and The San Francisco Examiner. Recent awards include a fully funded residency to the Surf Point Foundation, the Pollack Krasner Fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center, Visiting Artist at The Wassaic Project, and grants from the DC Commission on Arts & Humanities and Montgomery County Arts and Humanities Commission. Mysliwiec has also been a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail. She is on the board of Interlude Artist Residency, a residency for parent artists in Livingston, New York.