kurimanzutto is pleased to present Pale Fire, Marieta Chirulescu’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Chirulescu’s work captures the technical irregularities and misregistrations that occur throughout digital and analog processes of image making, producing pieces that speculate on and question the inherent nature of painting. Her creative process is one of breaking down, erasing, recopying, re- reading, re-searching, throwing away and rediscovering images in their own right, especially those that would seem to portray ‘nothing’. Scanned empty pieces of white paper with folds, scratches and subtle marks – traces of their physical existence – provide the source for many of her paintings.

In this exhibition Chirulescu will present her most recent works, which cultivate an ambiguity between painting and print that has become characteristic in her practice. While the canvases appear uniform in color, on close inspection they reveal rich nuance and depth, dissolving into blurred fields and textures. She is invested in process-based production, which for these works involves inkjet-printing digital images onto canvases that are partially painted over, sanded or erased. The artist reveals rather than conceals an editing practice that builds upon itself: the experience gathered while working on one painting informs the conception and realization of the next, providing the starting point for a new approach, but also the chance to look back and alter prior results. These inquiries have taken the artist from scanning scraps of paper, printing and editing them in a variety of ‘traditional’ painterly techniques, to experimenting with collage and laser-cuts in fabric.

Chirulescu’s explorations call attention to the very act of seeing in today’s world. The exhibition provides a space for contemplation, one that allows, in the words of French writer and poet Georges Perec, “to discover what you’ve never seen, what you didn’t expect, what you didn’t imagine. (...) Neither the grandiose nor the impressive, but rather the reverse, the familiar rediscovered.”