In Past Show

UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991-2015 at Hammer Museum

Using casein, carbon, spray paint, and gouache, Frances Stark transforms the mundane into poetry. Language, as both content and raw material, is a central theme in her austere paintings, works on paper, collages, and drawings. For Stark, the creative self is a performance, what she calls "a torment of follies" full of doubt and uncertainty and tinged with occasional transcendence. In one body of work, she used sentences and phrases from Robert Musil’s novel, The Man without Qualities, which she repeated vertically to create dense fields of lines and color. In addition to the text, she collaged different images such as old computer punch cards and pictures from a Microsoft calendar program onto the pieces.