JACKIE SACCOCCIO - DEGREE OF TILT

11R Eleven Rivington and Van Doren Waxter are delighted to present Degree of Tilt, a two-venue exhibition of new paintings by American artist Jackie Saccoccio. For this show, Saccoccio has realized her improvisational ‘portraits’ at an ambitious scale, up to 152 inches in width, fusing the physical and intangible to form these centripetal works.

Degree of Tilt takes its title from Saccoccio’s technique as coined by John Corbett in a 2015 interview. By manipulating the alchemical qualities of liquid pools, vis-a-vis tipping, dragging and shaking the large-scale works over one another, Saccoccio asks us to consider her pieces as functional tools, and the exhibition as a continuum of the studio. Inspired by Cy Twombly’s 2005 Bacchus series, Saccoccio includes the directional lines of transferred paint that bridge and overwhelm the vertiginous orbs.

Metaphorically, Saccoccio’s pieces serve as conceptual containers of overlapping influences that are embedded in the layers. The ill-fated couples Narcissus and Echo, and Cop 663 and Faye from Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express converge with the palettes of Marilyn Minter, Mondrian and Lisa Yuskavage. Referring to the ancient Roman drainage system, Saccoccio conceives of the totality of her paintings as a Cloaca Maxima: a repository where paint and ideas flow and pool.

Saccoccio’s comparison with the Cloaca Maxima resonates as an act of visual and intellectual excavation, mining through the artist’s painted layers, through the last half-century of art making, and through the questions that animate the paintings in Degree of Tilt.

Jackie Saccoccio (b. 1963) lives and works in Cornwall, CT, and Brooklyn, NY.  She has exhibited nationally and abroad for the last 20 years.  Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and her first museum solo exhibition in Europe, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, at the Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa.  Recent group exhibitions include Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Saatchi Gallery, London, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including The Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome; a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant; a Fulbright Foundation Grant; an Art Production Fund / Claude Monet Foundation Artists in Giverny residency; and most recently the 2015 Artadia NADA Award.