Elliott Puckette: Recent Works

SOCO Gallery is pleased to present Recent Works, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Elliott Puckette. The Kentucky-born, NYC-based artist is known for her compositions of fluid, vibrant lines that meander and twist across brilliant surfaces. Recent Works, Puckette's first-ever exhibition in North Carolina, will engage viewers in the spirit of her boundless arrangements and also reunite the artist with the Southeast, where she spent most of her childhood in the mountains of Tennessee. The gallery will host a public opening reception for the artist on Wednesday, September 13 from 6–8PM. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

Puckette challenges our understanding of the simplest of artistic forms, the line, which Puckette sees as a trail to endless compositional and conceptual possibilities. Each pivot, thinning, and swirling of the line narrates the moment of its making by Puckette, giving each mark a distinct identity. Puckette’s work navigates the often overlooked expressive potential of the line, producing seemingly effortless compositions that divulge their complexity to the curious viewer. While Puckette’s approach to her paintings and works on paper requires different techniques, each nevertheless emerges from a thoughtful, laborious process. In a 1996 interview with Elle Decor, Puckette speaks of her method: “I [am] trying to emulate those first impulses of trying to write something, when you pretend that you can write by making up narratives as you scribble; those narratives immediately evaporate when you stop making the marks.” In Recent Works, Puckette renders a line whose calligraphic curves and lyrical contours invite the viewer to follow where it may lead.

Elliot Puckette (American, B. 1967)
Elliott Puckette received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1989. Puckette’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and Vogue, among other publications.. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library, and the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.