Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Leidy Churchman
12
Floor 5
Born 1979 in Villanova, PA
Lives in New York, NY, and West Tremont, ME
Mountains Walking embraces the interconnectedness evoked in Ei Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra. The classic thirteenth-century Zen text describes reality as interdependent and permeable. “Like Claude Monet’s water lilies, Mountains and Waters Sutra is porous. It enters the water lilies,” Leidy Churchman has noted. “They both create so much space. Water lilies are like graffiti, or emotions. They could just go on and on, and in Dogen’s world everything is mutual and enlightened.” The carved feet at the base of the painting invoke the claws of a Buddhist protector deity. The yellow grid emerges and disappears across the paintings as though unable to contain the activity held within. Churchman’s wide-ranging approach to painting encompasses diagrams, advertisements, art history, transgender reality, Buddhist philosophy, and the natural world: “It’s about autonomy. I’m going to let this painting have its own subject, its own way, and invoke its own universe. The next one will be whatever it becomes. It’s part of a continuum.”
Mountains Walking, 2022
Leidy Churchman, Mountains Walking, 2022. Oil on linen, hand-crafted wood easel, three canvases, 6 1/2 × 13 ft. (2 × 4 m) each. Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist; Rodeo, London and Piraeus, Greece; and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles. Photograph by Sandenwolff
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Leidy Churchman, Mountains Walking
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David Breslin: Hi, I’m David Breslin. I’m the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives at the Whitney, and the co-curator with Adrienne Edwards of this Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept.
Leidy Churchman is a maker and painter of worlds. And perhaps bringing together worlds that I, you, we might not think to bring together.
This is a painting that Leidy has made for the Biennial; Leidy has brought together Monet, the grid, and space. The easel becomes a sculptural element of the entire painting. I don’t usually think of Monet, and outer space, and a grid together, but when Leidy does it, it makes sense. Or, how it doesn’t make sense makes me want to understand each element better, or maybe insist that not everything has to make sense, or there are other and new ways to make meaning.
And I know for Adrienne and me, that possibility that painting can do that, that an artist who’s using oil paint on a stretched canvas, even though Leidy doesn’t ever just have a stretched canvas. I mean, look at the feet on this sculpture/painting. That these forms that we think we know can take new resonance, depend on who’s making them, what we’re seeing, and when we’re seeing it.