Anita Thacher
Competing Realities
March 21 – April 27, 2024
Opening Thursday March 21, 6-8pm
Installation Views
Microscope is very pleased to present “Competing Realities,” the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery of works by Anita Thacher (d. New York, 2017). The show features wool yarn installations from the series “Corner Corner” (2002) exhibiting for the first time in New York, along with the artist’s renowned film “Homage to Magritte” completed in 1974, which premiered that same year at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the New York Film Festival (NYFF) at Lincoln Center.
The exhibition also marks the inauguration of the Anita Thacher Archive — housed within the gallery and devoted to Thacher’s works, artist notes, correspondence and other records — which will be open by appointment for consultation, research, and educational purposes.
Despite their different mediums and a separation of nearly 40 years, the works in “Competing Realities” all center around the domestic domain, provoking the viewer into asking: is what we see — or expect to see — really there or imagined?
For each installation in the “Corner Corner” series, a single strand of dark wool yarn is used to “draw” the outline of a structure situated within and spanning across a corner of the gallery space. Whether assuming the shape of a house or creating the appearance of alternative corners and meeting points of the gallery walls and floor, each installation tricks the eye into seeing contrasting and often shifting senses of dimension. Thacher writes of the deceptively simple works: “The yarn constructions compete with the actual corners for reality and challenge the viewer to embrace contradictory perceptions.”
In Thacher’s hands, the corner — an architectural necessity and a typically overlooked area of any room or home — is frequently rendered magical or mysterious, and is the focus of several other works dating back to her photographic and film installation works titled “Loose Corner” (1980-1986), which were the subjects of her previous solo exhibition at the gallery in 2021-22.
The 10-minute film “Homage to Magritte” (1974), is a posthumous tribute to the painter — made at a time when he was less widely known — that appears to picture the unspoken thoughts of a woman standing before a window in a corner area of her home. In this visionary film, Thacher subverts gender stereotypes and the laws of physics in her re-imagining of the domestic realm. The artist’s distinctive, mesmerizing surreal scenes — such as eggs frying on ocean waves and multiple horizon lines — are achieved through the layering of often unrelated imagery and the analog process of optical printing on 16mm film.
“This film begins with the sense of juxtaposition and the absurd that are the basis of René Magritte’s paintings, then successfully makes its own contributions to the Surrealist tradition through manipulation of the filmed image.” – MoMA
“Anita Thacher: Competing Realities” opens March 21th and continues through April 27th. Opening Reception: Thursday March 21th, 6-8pm. For further information, please contact us at inquiries@microscopegallery.com.
To schedule an appointment at the Anita Thacher Archive, please contact us at anitathacherarchive@microscopegallery.com.
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Anita Thacher was a New York artist working in multiple mediums including painting, moving image, light, installation, photography, and sculpture, among others. Her practice frequently addresses issues of spatial and personal perception, memory, and the domestic realm. While working on collages at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting of Sculpture in the mid-1960s, Thacher realized that the medium of film would be better suited to achieve the sense of three-dimensionality she was seeking, and enrolled in classes at Millennium Film Workshop.
Thacher made nearly 20 short experimental films and videos starting in 1968 with the 16mm film “Permanent Wave,” and concluding with the video trilogy “CUT”, “CHASE”, and “THE END” (2013-15), which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. Beginning in the late 1970s, Thacher also began creating medium to large-scale installations and sculptures ranging from multiple 35mm slide installations to site specific works investigating the illusion of space, using artificial and natural light as sources of illumination. Thacher continued to work with a wide palette of mediums throughout her lifetime.
Her work has exhibited in institutional shows at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; Sculpture Center, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, Long Island, Queens, NY; The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, among many others, and her films have screened extensively across the US and abroad. Her artworks and films can be found, among others, in the collections of The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin, Germany; and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive, Los Angeles, CA, where her works on 16mm film have been undergoing preservation since 2017.
Her work has been reviewed in Afterimage, Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Miami Herald, and numerous others. Grants and awards include those from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, Ford Foundation, American Film Institute, and French Minister of Culture, to name a few. Thacher was the inaugural recipient of the Martin E. Segal Award of Lincoln Center, a MacDowell Colony Fellow and former Board Member, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow. She was born in New York City where she lived and worked until her death in 2017.
