MARGARET WELSH
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Biography
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Works
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Unfree Composition Number 2
2022 house paint on paper bag on panel 16 x 16 x 1 1/2 in 40.6 x 40.6 x 3.8 cm |
A Chicago-based artist, feminist abstractionist, and patron saint of the overlooked, Margaret Welsh has spent decades turning low materials into high drama. Dropcloths, shopping bags, and mis-tinted house paints—all things most people step over on their way to something “important”—are transubstantiated in her hands. Subtle, restrained, but vibrating with emotional consequence, her pieces hover somewhere between glamour and aftermath, between a lipstick stain and an existential crisis.
Welsh’s “Trophy Women,” for example, don’t behave like trophies at all; they are seductive, blunt, slightly menacing objects with the slick finish of plastic skin and the psychic energy of a woman who has already left the party but is still somehow the main subject of conversation. ARTFORUM gave both of Welsh’s recent exhibitions its coveted “Must See” blessing, not because her work cries out for attention but because it quietly refuses to disappear. Welsh’s abstractions feel like self-portraits in disguise. She paints like someone who knows beauty is political, that softness can be confrontational, and that being a woman in abstraction means inheriting a room built by men and rearranging its emotional architecture without asking for permission. Her work has been exhibited at PPOW (NYC), White Columns (NYC), CASSTL (Antwerp), Charim Project Space (Vienna), and DOCUMENT (Chicago). |
