Stacks and Wrap-ups

The Stacks and Wrap-ups are a series of large canvases that emerged out of the series of Market Paintings. I became interested in the markets after hours when they were closed. When I began the paintings I had no idea that the COVID 19 pandemic would close shops and markets all around the world. The crisis has given the paintings new unexpected resonances.

The catalyst for the paintings was an experience I had in the central market of the remote Argentinian town of San Juan. In one section of the market were a series of piled up stacks of market goods and paraphernalia that evoked a warehouse art installation of large-scale sculptures. The objects were immense, bound-up and mysterious. They evoked powerful forces of production and consumption, distribution and waste. I began to imagine a series of large canvases devoted to these objects that in their bulk and form raised a simulacrum of the market’s energy and activity precisely by rendering them as absent, closed, hidden, under wraps.

The title of the series Stacks and Wrap-ups gives a nod to art history – minimalism, Christo and Jeanne Claudes wrapped objects, and I had in mind sculptural conventions going back to Arte Povera, encompassing assemblage processes and the concept of the found object.