Elaine Reichek

While attending Brooklyn College in the 1960s, Elaine Reichek had been deeply influenced by her studies with Ad Reinhardt, who taught that every element in a work of art must be accounted for and that self-imposed limitations could yield great variety. Around 1971, as she was working on a group of minimalist abstract paintings, Reichek began using thread as a way to draw. She quickly realized that a line of thread — unlike one rendered in pencil or paint — is actually an embodied line, independent of the canvas support yet physically attached to it, literally piercing the “picture plane.” Only after seeing a series of these paintings, in her first solo show in 1975, did Reichek realize that she had been sewing, and that her “high art” had drifted into the “low art” territory of craft and “women’s work.”

 

In subsequent works, Reichek continued to embrace post-minimalist applications of systems-based procedures as well as the gendered connotations of fabric and thread. Through the 1980s-90s, this exploration would find her incorporating photographic sources as well as knit elements and collage.  Always tropic to literature, aesthetics, appropriation, and wit, Reichek deftly and reverently folds history and culture into her arsenal of imagery. Beth Handler states in her essay for the artist's solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999, "Elaine Reichek delights in making ideas material–in endowing them with the delicate physicality found in the medium of embroidery. Using this form of handwork, she lays bare a fabric of beliefs and preconceptions about aesthetics, and about culture more generally, by examining the images, texts and objects that such conceptions have shaped." 

 

In the early 1990s, Reichek began researching the history of the embroidered sampler and sewing new versions of traditional patterns. In her revisionist samplers, she strategically replaces the usual scriptural verse or wise maxim-which young girls learned to sew as part of their education-with alternative literary or historical quotes from a distinctly feminist perspective, whether critical or humorous. Over time, as Reichek appropriated from a wider variety of both textual and art historical sources, her embroideries have expanded beyond the formal bounds of the sampler, even as they continue to employ thread and fabric as fundamental materials.

 

Elaine Reichek lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University and has exhibited extensively since the mid-1970s in the United States and abroad. She has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, and Brooklyn Museum; Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida; the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and The Menil Collection, Houston, among others.

 

Reichek’s work was included in Art_Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, in 2015; Art/Histories at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, in 2014; the 2012 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil; the 2012 Whitney Biennial; and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2011 in Korea. Reichek's work was included in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 2022 exhibition Women's Work at the Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY., and Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by Hilton Als, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, and the Perez Museum, Miami, FL.  Reichek has recently exhibited with Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK;  Marinaro Gallery, New York, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.