Medrie MacPhee (born 1953) is a Canadian-American painter based in New York City.Fateman, Johanna. "Medrie MacPhee," The New Yorker, March 2021. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Wayne, Leslie. "Comfort Clothing for Fraught Times: Medrie MacPhee in conversation with Leslie Wayne," Artcritical, July 20, 2017. Retrieved August 30, 2021. She works in distinct painting and drawing series that have explored the juncture of abstraction and representation, relationships between architecture, machines, technology and human evolution, and states of flux and transformation.Berlind, Robert. "Medrie MacPhee at 49th Parallel," Art In America, April 1989, p. 264.Johnson, Ken. "Medrie MacPhee at Baldacci Daverio," Art In America, July 1993, p. 108.Goodman, Jonathan. "Medrie MacPhee and Amy Sillman," Contemporary Visual Arts, January 1999, p. 50–5.Dault, Gary Michael. "To Know or Not to Know: That is The Question," The Globe and Mail, November 4, 2006, p. R12. In the 1990s and 2000s, she gained attention for metaphorical paintings of industrial subjects and organic-machine and bio-technological forms.Clarkson, David. "Medrie MacPhee," Canadian Art, Summer 1993, p. 80–3.Wilkin, Karen. "At The Galleries," Partisan Review, Vol. LXIII, No. 1, 1996.Laurence, Robin. "Medrie MacPhee in conversation with Robin Laurence”, Canadian Art, Summer 1999, p. 46–9.Hanna, Deidre. "Surreal Deal," Now (Toronto), April 18–24, 2001. In later work, she explored architectural instability before turning to semiotically dense canvases combining compartments of color and collaged pieces of garments fit together like puzzles, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith described as "powerfully flat, more literal than abstract" with "an adamant, witty physicality."Kee, Christina. "Hybrid 'Futuristic Species': The latest from Medrie MacPhee," Artcritical, July 6, 2010. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Maine, Stephen. "The Clothes Make the Painting," Hyperallergic, July 8, 2017. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Smith, Roberta. "4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now," The New York Times, February 17, 2021, p. C7. Retrieved August 30, 2021.
MacPhee has received a Guggenheim FellowshipArtforum. "Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News, April 10, 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2021. and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,Selvin, Claire. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation Names Winners of $3 M. in Grants," ARTnews, April 17, 2019. Retrieved August 30, 2021. Anonymous Was a Woman,Anonymous Was a Woman. 2017 Winners: Medrie MacPhee. Retrieved August 30, 2021. National Endowment for the Arts and American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Medrie MacPhee, Fellows. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Hyperallergic. "The American Academy of Arts and Letters Presents the 2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts," March 3, 2020. Retrieved August 30, 2021. Her work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Metropolitan Museum of Art. Disk Study, Collection. Retrieved September 9, 2021. National Gallery of Canada,National Gallery of Canada. Medrie MacPhee, Collection, Artist. Retrieved September 9, 2021. and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. " Painting Nature with a Mirror," Exhibitions. Retrieved September 9, 2021. She has taught at Bard College, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design and Sarah Lawrence College.Butler, Sharon. "Interview: Medrie MacPhee in Ridgewood," Two Coats of Paint, March 17, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2021.
Early life and career MacPhee was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1953 and studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.Freedman, Adele. "Medrie MacPhee’s Industrial Poetics," Canadian Art, Fall 1989. During a class trip to New York City in 1976, she was drawn to the city's number of women artists and deteriorating, evolving urban environment and soon arranged to study there through an exchange program.Enright, Robert. "Ungrounding Science: Medrie MacPhee’s Meditations on Survival," Border Crossings, Summer 2001, p. 80–6.Hunt, Stephan. "Fictional Spaces," The Calgary Herald, December 12, 2014. Retrieved August 30, 2021. After earning her BFA later that year, she permanently moved to New York, working a series of odd jobs while producing art out of various studios in Manhattan before settling in a Bowery loft studio from 1990 to 2013.
In New York, the subject matter of her painting shifted from portraits to industrial architecture exploring relationships between structures, the body and human evolution. She received critical attention for these urban paintings beginning in the later 1980s, through solo exhibitions at 49th Parallel (1988)Sturman, John. "Medrie MacPhee, 49th Parallel," ARTnews, June, 1989. Phillipe Daverio Gallery (1991)Cohen, Ronny. "Medrie MacPhee," Artforum, October 1991, p. 127. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Wilkin, Karen. "At The Galleries," Partisan Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 3, 1991, p. 533–40. and Paolo Baldacci Gallery (1992–7) in New York, Concordia University (Montreal, 1988),Lehmann, Henry. "Poetry In Ruins: MacPhee’s Luminous Art," Daily News (Montreal), 1988. and Mira Godard Gallery (Toronto, 1988, 1990).Hart, Matthew. "Focus on Medrie MacPhee," Canadian Art, Spring 1989, p.103.
Work and reception MacPhee's work has moved from metaphorical industrial and imagined landscapes through hybrid mixes of representation, abstraction, biology and technology to more abstract works that nonetheless incorporate real-world objects and allusion.Mackay, Gillian, "Luscious paint, cast-off photos and enigmatic tableaus”, The Globe and Mail, June 19, 1999.Wilkin, Karen. "At the Galleries," Hudson Review, Summer 2006, p. 273–80. Retrieved August 30, 2021.Gopnik, Blake. "Medrie MacPhee Paints with a Tailor’s Shears," Artnet, June 20, 2017. Retrieved August 30, 2021. Despite her work's range, critics have identified several unifying themes: an anthropomorphizing impulse that examines how the built and machine worlds mirror psychological states; interest in processes of disintegration, metamorphosis or evolution; exploration of the past as a pointer to the future; open-ended meaning; and humor.Bellerby, Greg. Medrie MacPhee, Vancouver, BC: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1999.Laurence, Robin. "MacPhee Meditates on Modernism’s Failings," The Georgia Straight (Vancouver), March 11–8, 1999.Goodman, Jonathan. "Medrie MacPhee at Michael Steinberg," Art In America, May 2006, p. 192. In formal terms, these themes translate into her use of collage, attention to the expressive qualities of materials and painted surfaces, and ambiguous, often disorienting uses of space and scale.Lehmann, Henry. "Artist Animates Life’s Nuts and Bolts," Gazette (Montreal), May 1, 1999.
"Industrial" series MacPhee's early industrial paintings presented enigmatic, sometimes fantastical exteriors of abandoned structures and aging machinery drawn from the decaying industrial environment of New York and Montreal's harbor front: silos, water towers, holding tanks, viaducts, conveyers, conduits, container piers. The paintings emphasized draftsmanship—with lines and hard edges defining large modeled volumes—as well as varied surfaces of dry, scraped areas, thin turpentine washes and sewn-on canvas, dramatic shifts between close-ups and vast expanse, and chiaroscuro lighting evoking a poignant, forlorn quality. Artforum'''s Ronnie Cohen described MacPhee's approach as part objective and part romantic, with imagination informing "fascinating transfigurations of things, imbuing them with a vital anthropomorphism."
Critics made comparisons to the somber metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper and visionary scenes of Piranesi, reading these paintings as metaphors for the female body, nature or human development (e.g., Self-Portrait in the Mountains, 1986; Frida’s Garden, 1990), which examined relationships between man and machine, obsolescence, survival and the exhaustion of modernist utopianism. Art in America's Robert Berlind wrote that MacPhee "invert(ed) the post-Cubist tradition of abstracted, machine-like figuration," finding life, sexuality and "the pathos of extinction" in industrial relics (e.g., Dinosaurs and Siamese Twins, 1987).
Painting series (1992–2011) In the 1990s, MacPhee employed a more allusive mix of representation and abstraction—as well as humor—in bodies of work that alternately evoked watery environments, whirlwinds of fragmented organic-mechanical components, and imaginary future species.Hanna, Deidre. "Industrial landscapes show emotion," Now (Toronto), September 10, 1992.Goodman, Jonathan. "Medrie MacPhee," Canadian Art, Spring 1996, p. 96. "The Floating World" series (1992–3) explored dissolving boundaries between nature, machine and body in scenes suggesting growth or renewal from within ambiguous interior structures. They employed vertically rising, reassembled forms prefigured in the industrial works, which shifted disconcertingly between mechanical and organic: gears and lily pads, wires and vines, springs and tendrils (e.g., The Music of Spheres, 1992). Art in America critic Ken Johnson termed them illuminated "underwater forests" projecting "an impressionistic naturalism" and "otherworldly numinous quality"; Canadian Art described them as "futuristic cities with mile-high spires and disc-like jetcopter pads," whose visual and poetic effects were "luminous and oddly languid."
MacPhee turned to oversized gouache and charcoal drawings collaged and mounted on canvas in the "Flight in the Variable Zone" series (1995–7). Its patchworks depicted free-falling, idiosyncratic elements—gaskets, gears, pumps and pulleys—seemingly swept up and reworked into new forms by whirlwinds or vortices. Like the "Floating" works, they employ a subdued radiance and spatial shifts between miniature and monumental. Critics suggested the series conveyed a sense of social disintegration and eclipsed functionality, as well as new possibility;Drucker, Johanna. "Images of a Displaced Past: Michael Flanagan and Medrie MacPhee," Art Journal, Summer 1996. Karen Wilkin likened its fragility and lyricism to da Vinci's diagrammatic machine drawings, which mix engineering, anatomical and botanical elements.
MacPhee extended her interest in metamorphosis with the "Unnatural Selection" series (1997–2001), marrying technology and biology to imagine outlandish, possibly engineered successors to humanity.Johnson, Ken. Review, "Pushing Paint," The New York Times, September 14, 2001. Retrieved August 30, 2021. The series recombines her vocabulary into visceral, hybrid forms such as bellows, riveted cones, spindles, hoops and organs, set in vague, garishly colored vistas, often amid tubes suggesting blood vessels (e.g., Hot Spot and Chop Suey, 1998).Peden, Paul. "It’s the New Thing," Miser and Now, November, 2003, p. 1–8. She painted them in vinyl polymer, taking advantage of its hardness, matte opacity and artificial color to shift from her earlier atmospherics to more directly experienced painting spaces influenced by Italian frescoes. This directness extended to the viewer's emotional identification with her composited forms, which functioned like characters burdened by human feelings, personalities and situations.Sillman, Amy. "Excerpts from a Conversation Between Amy Sillman and Medrie MacPhee," Words Fail Me: Medrie MacPhee, New York: Tibor de Nagy, 2021. Reviews sometimes compared the series' spaces to surrealist work and their affect—an absurdist mix of vulnerability, exhaustion, erotics, grim humor and survival reflecting the modern fragmentation of life—to work by Philip Guston.