4 August 2026
Discovered Pati Hill (1921-2014) last week and she has been sustaining me since. What a great artist. To anyone reading this: I would recommend Baptiste Pinteaux's essay on the occasion of her 2020 exhibition Heaven’s door is open to us Like a big vacuum cleaner at Air de Paris for a good background rundown. Her writing and poems are lovely, and I'll have to get into that part of her oeuvre separately (though they are often attached to her images). But for now—noting her photocopy artworks (of objects fed to the copier from her housewife life) that I have up in the studio right now:
Untitled (petals) (1980) Untitled (broken glass and dragonflies) (1990) Untitled (jabot) (1976) Untitled tryptych (1980-83) Untitled (fur coat) (1976) Untitled (note: the one of black ovals over white) (1980) Untitled (Swan's wing) (1978)
There's so much to say when I have more than one brain cell wiggling around (it's very late), but this is vital work that carries both condition and projection; I don't know that I've ever come across work that conveys such immediacy while simultaneously implying such distance and/or detachment. Her method is unflinching and unending, a defiant wellspring examining everything felt under the threat of life unlived.