LIZ ALDERMAN: MUCKLINGS

Mucklings features fifteen of Alderman’s striking, grotesque, and strangely tender bird bas-reliefs. True to her process, the artist embeds the detritus of her own existence—dryer lint, latex gloves, pill casings, Brillo pads, thumbtacks, screwdrivers, hair, and more—into each painted surface. These hybrid objects form a dense physical terrain through which Alderman’s brush must navigate, resulting in expressive, high-impasto works that teeter between portraiture and assemblage.

The exhibition title, a made-up word, captures the murky convergence of the avian world and the filth that humans foist upon it. Beneath the vivid hues and exaggerated plumage, Alderman’s birds evoke a sense of rot, resilience, and psychological complexity. As she puts it, her interest lies in “what clings, what festers, and what lurks beneath any given surface—be it decay, memory, or trauma.”

Each work poses uneasy questions: Are these birds flaunting their ornamentation or drowning in it? Are we witnessing a display of joy, or a breakdown of hope? The tension between attraction and revulsion lies at the core of Alderman’s practice—challenging viewers to reexamine their own emotional reactions to beauty, waste, and transformation.

LIZ ALDERMAN: PRETTY HAMMERS

The recently-launched The Old Bailey Gallery has invited New York City artist Liz Alderman to be its second Artist-In-Residence at its location in the Crestwood neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama.  The Old Bailey Gallery is an innovative new artist residency program and contemporary art gallery founded by Birmingham local Dan Bailey.  Alderman’s residency will run alongside a solo exhibition of her bird paintings entitled “PRETTY HAMMERS.”

“PRETTY HAMMERS” features heavy-impasto mixed-media paintings of birds inspired by the "yellow hammer” woodpecker, the official state bird of Alabama.

LIZ ALDERMAN: FLOCKED

Birds are the visual subject matter of choice for artist Liz Alderman.  Their shapes, colors and expressivity are the perfect fodder for the artist to exult in the materiality of paint.

FLOCKED features heavy-impasto paintings of eagles, finches, swallows and an albatross to which the artist has assigned names like Cokie, Ragnar, Irene and Phoebe.  The artist creates an imaginative persona for each bird that develops over the course of each paintings’ creation.  A bird may first appear in the painting process with a countenance of stoicism or despair only to flip into the quintessence of joy or even mania, as embodied through Alderman’s unpredictable and multifaceted painting techniques.  Alderman’s bold gestrual brushwork can be sensuous and refined, or cartoonish and even violent. 

 The conflicting moods that Alderman’s birds emote are paralleled by conflicts of painterly style within each work.  Each canvas is a frenetic arena of diverse painting techniques; paint is poured, then directed towards figuration with a brush, then smeared back into abstraction with a palette knife, then dissolved into drips that are further transformed into contour lines that describe feathers, beaks, waves or wings.  Several of the bird paintings in FLOCKED contain entire tubes of paint, squeezed directly onto the canvas to delineate a horizon line, a talon, ship masts, sails or tree trunks.

The title of the show, FLOCKED, is a nod to the world of birds but is also a reference to the process of “flocking” fabric, a centuries-old technique of creating patterned surface textures on fabrics with adhesives.  Alderman’s canvases are similarly flocked.

Prior to starting a painting Alderman glues items to the canvas arbitrarily without forethought or knowledge of what the final figure portrayed will be.  Alderman’s canvases are “flocked” with elements like synthetic fur, shredded paper, crinolines, ripped stockings, lace and broken jewelry. Alderman’s aim is to make the painting process unpredictable by covering her work surface with roadblocks that her brush must work around, into, onto or over. 

“Painting is like pin-ball,” says the artist, “I create a mezzo-rilievo surface using my trash, basically, then propel myself into the painting process and hope to keep to the ball in play, embracing accidents and inviting in the unknown. Eventually a bird emerges.”

To enhance the unpredictability of her painting process the artist mixes the slough of her own existence into her paint; riffraff such as the contents of her junk mail shredder, dryer lint or string from frayed clothes are all added to her paints to create a viscous stew that can be difficult to manipulate with grace or subtlety. 

As a result of her technique, her paintings resemble ecstatically apocalyptic alien landscapes full of pools, ridges, ravines and rivulets that are especially apparently when observed from a raking angle. 

The detritus flocked onto the surface and the inscrutable effluvium within her paint come together to coagulate into grotesque bas-reliefs than span figuration and abstraction.

Clearly influenced by Van Gogh, Soutine and Auerbach as well as contemporary Allison Schulnik, Alderman has doubled-down on the physical properties of paint in the age of AI in order to create a tactile circus of marks that is flirtatious, bizarre, theatrical and best experienced in person. 

FLOCKED will run from JUNE 11 – OCTOBER 31, 2023

ON WAVES

Liz Alderman, Kevin Dudley, Anna Ehrsam, Eric Feuer, Katherine Jackson, Patrick Meagher, Iliana Ortega, Dalila Pasotti, Pestypig

On Waves is a group show on the theme of motion, water, signals, and movement, curated by Silvershed, an artist-run project in downtown Manhattan that explores contemporary art values, ethics and aesthetics of the 21st century. Silvershed works through lateral discussion among a core team of organizers and advisors to collaborate on exhibitions, publications and events in New York, Los Angeles and Berlin.

LexArtSci: FREEFORM

In conjunction with the 2024 edition of Upstate Art Weekend, I’m honored to have two of my bird bas-relief paintings “Rosie” and “Hubert” on view at LexArtSci’s Lexington House Gallery alongside the work of talented sculptors Deborah Czeresko and Kat Howard as well as painter Julie Peppito.