Janet Malcolm: Recent Collages

October 26 – December 9, 2006

Janet Malcolm
Untitled 
2005
Mixed media
30 ½ x 26 ½ x 5 ¾ inches
(LBFA #804)

Janet Malcolm
Untitled (Red Square)
2006
Paper collage
7 x 7 ½ inches
(LBFA #769)

Janet Malcolm
Coupons
2006
Paper collage
8 ½ x 14 inches
(LBFA #756)

Janet Malcolm
Les Jours de Notre Mort
2006
Paper collage
23 x 15 inches
(LBFA #760)

Janet Malcolm
Agnes Martin
2005
Paper collage
13 ½ x 10 ½ inches
(LBFA #250)

Janet Malcolm
Joseph A. Winn, M.D.
2006
Paper collage
16 x 19 ½ inches
(LBFA #759)

Janet Malcolm
Aviso
2004
Paper collage
12 x 16 inches
(LBFA #754)

Janet Malcolm
Muybridge
2004
Paper collage
10 x 6 ½ inches
(LBFA #761)

Janet Malcolm
Wollens
2006
Paper collage
7 x 5 inches
(LBFA #770)

Janet Malcolm
Olana
2006
Paper collage
9 x 6 inches
(LBFA #763)

Janet Malcolm
D.
2006
Paper collage
6 x 3 ½ inches
(LBFA #757)

Janet Malcolm
Robert Gardner
2004
Paper collage
9 ½ x 7 inches
(LBFA #764)

Janet Malcolm
New York City
2006
Paper collage
7 ½ x 22 ¼ inches
(LBFA #762)

Janet Malcolm
Thirteen
2006
Paper collage
10 ½ x 7 inches
(LBFA #767)

Janet Malcolm
Swiss Bittersweet
2004
Paper collage
7 ½ x 5 inches
(LBFA #251)

Janet Malcolm
Sanatorium
2005
Paper collage
8 x 10 inches
(LBFA #765)

Janet Malcolm
The Death of Anna Karenina
2005
Paper collage
10 x 5 ¾ inches
(LBFA #766)

Janet Malcolm
Untitled
2005
Paper collage
10 ¼ x 39 ½ inches
(LBFA #768)

Janet Malcolm
Chocolate
2006
Paper collage
9 ½ x 7 inches
(LBFA #755)

Press Release

Janet Malcolm: Recent Collages
October 26 – December 9, 2006

From October 26th through December 9th, Lori Bookstein Fine Art will present new and recent collages by Janet Malcolm. This is the artist’s second solo show at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

The 20 works on display draw on an arsenal of found and collected material; synthesizing old book covers, disintegrating sheets of statistical data, library cards, tickets and stamps, vintage photographs and all other manner of written and printed material, and regularly punctuated by rectangles of pure, concentrated color. Whether arranged around a loose grid, or bursting forth from their centers, an integral sense of structure emerges out of the debris of decades past.

Malcolm’s career as a writer is a tempting context from which to draw narrative meaning in her collages. As an artist, however, she is a formalist; textual and visual citations may be culled from sources personal, historical or very much mundane, but once appropriated it is their esthetic properties which inform the composition rather than their literal ones. Words and numbers are stripped of their prior meaning, first by displacement (in addition to the disparate utilitarian origins of the source material, words are often in other languages) and then by physical obstruction. Phrases are truncated or bisected, their edges are shaved off, they are veiled behind yellowed vellum or selected, one thinks, because time has already done much to obscure or destroy their message.

Of her collages, the author Lee Siegel has written: “Malcolm’s esthetic choices have a fatality to them: she combines her colors and textures so unerringly that the harmony of her collages seems to be a condition that she discovered rather than an illusion that she brought into being.” Indeed, the paradox of Malcolm’s collages is that they embody an exactness which appears to be both inevitable and freshly, almost casually, arrived upon.

Janet Malcolm: Recent Collages will be on view from October 26th through December 9th. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30am to 6:00pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, the gallery may be contacted as follows: