Portrait by Colin Patrick Smith
Night Gallery is thrilled to announce the representation of the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elaine Stocki. This partnership follows Stocki’s 2021 solo debut at Night Gallery, The Absolute Trick, and participation in the 2020 group show MAJEURE FORCE. She will present her second solo show at the gallery in 2023.
Elaine Stocki’s paintings are objects of alchemical transformation that revitalize the medium and push the artist’s materials into novel territories of form and color. Her process-based works integrate the repeated gestures of staining, deconstructing, and reassembling to yield unexpected qualities in texture and hue. Such an intimate, cross-pollinating relationship with material suggests the allegorical potential wedded into each painting, as the meandering fluidity of watercolor meets the weighty permanence of oil on the textile surface. The diverse traditions of women’s work, Abstract Expressionism, assemblage, and craft are placed into an active dialogue with one another, building dynamic compositional variety and challenging the hierarchical division between artists and laborers. Through her approach, Stocki speaks to the transcendent capacities of painting, weaving raw material into a singular aesthetic philosophy.
Elaine Stocki (b. 1979, Winnipeg, Canada) holds degrees in both Chemistry and Fine Art from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, among others. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Border Crossings Magazine. In 2019, Stocki's first monograph was published by SKIRA Paris on the occasion of a ten year survey of her work at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Stocki lives and works in Los Angeles.