We’ll Put on the Day and Wear it till Night Comes. Bella Foster

About

The Pit is pleased to announce We’ll Put on the Day and Wear it till Night Comes, our second solo exhibition by artist Bella Foster.  The exhibition will be on view from February 29 to April 11, 2020 with a public reception on Saturday February 29 from 5-8pm.  The exhibition will consist of a new series of Foster’s recognizable water-based paintings depicting figures, interiors, objects from art history, and personal belongings of the artists’ friends and colleagues.

Dear Bella,

We just got off the phone.

Your new paintings are like sand in an hourglass, quiet and slow. The antelope head stuck with me when I looked at the pictures yesterday. I loved seeing that note in miniature inside a seemingly eternal space. It reminded me of an image on a postage stamp inside a bag of letters.

Lately I’ve been looking at adobes. I find them so appealing but I worry about the impossibility of hanging art inside a round home. It creates an existential quandary for me. Art or adobe? I guess you could always build a shed out back with those sliding walls collectors use, or you would have to get obsessed with the idea of not living with art, having a mind free of influence, satiated with colored glass and organic fixtures.

The shelves in your paintings remind me of escalators for crossing the busiest intersections in Japan. They are like walking straight but upwards, through space. The feeling of the shape is flat and tubular. Kangaroo’s pocket, internal instead of external, even though they are a display. I guess that’s because you are showing things in your paintings by keeping them near.  The stuff isn’t exactly individuated, it’s more like reflected.

I keep thinking about Neil Young and Graham Nash lyrics about building your life on sand and everything turning to dust. ‘I Used to be a King’ is such a sad song. It’s about how things were once great but then changed. I guess it’s a given that everything ages and falls apart. Things grow moss and show wear which is romantic and everything, but it’s a battle not to buckle under the weight of time.

Painting is a lovely tribute. I know you approach your work tenderly and that it’s an extension of relationships that are meaningful to you. All art is really a bit of a graveyard, a scale shift. One thing holds up another.

Anyways. Miss you. Love you.

xo Adrianne