The Fan Factorial series is from Reichek’s earliest mature works from the 1970s. A decade prior, at Brooklyn College, 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. In particular she prized organdy, the crisp and semi-sheer cotton commonly used in bridal gowns and party dresses, for its ability to suggest a light-infused mutability of form.

The Fan Factorial series consists of two sets of works: stitched fabric on rice paper paper pieces revel in the rich color palettes that play out through the alternating layered permutations of four shades of organdy; and gray-scale colored pencil drawings of the same shapes, in different patterns and declinations of shades.