2018 Catalogue Archive

Annie Albers, Sheila Hicks, and Bridget Riley are clear influences on New York-based Samantha Bittman, yet her work takes the viewer into new territory as it plays with weaving, perception, and color. To make a painting, Bittman first weaves the patterned fabric on a loom. She then matches paint to each of the colors in her textile, seen here in the four colors of this untitled work. By adding to, and negating, the pattern with the color-matched paint, Bittman inverts and modifies the regular grid laid out by the woven background, exploring all the outcomes of her self-contained system, and in the process generating a number of optically jarring events on the surface. Bittman’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad.