Marcelle Joseph Projects is pleased to present Material Girls and their Muses, an exhibition featuring the work of four female artists and their chosen muses.

‘Curious, I thought. This discussion of the male artist, female muses and inspirational intercourse. In this modern day.

Indeed, there is a whiff of the ‘kitchen studio’ in the artistic practices of this quartet, though I am reluctant to stress it. These artists, all women – does it matter? – have all employed domestic-led materials and processes.

There’s a kind of ecstatic orgy of domestic appropriation going on which is great, but in some instances it seems hollowed out and cannibalistic. As with any reaction to life, the best art is ahead of the game, it simultaneously interrogates and flows back. I really must apply Foucault’s notion of practices of the self which is especially relevant to contemporary feminist practices, especially consciousness raising and autobiography. And so I come to realise, enhanced with the situational juxtaposition of these four artists and their muses, that the connection between self-transformation and social transformation that Foucault theorizes as the connection between subjectivity and institutional and social norms is entirely crucial for contemporary feminist theory and politics, and at their most plaintive; These Works.

If these artists were in the pulpit, their muses in the choir, I would totes be at church every Sunday morning.’ – text by Aindrea Emelife

Andrea Crespo (born 1993 in Miami, Florida) lives and works in New York. She will finish her BFA at Pratt Institute in 2015. Dubbed a ‘post-internet artist’ and interested in otaku and nerd culture, Crespo combines hand-drawn manga images of hyperreal bodies that take on virtual lives outside of her art practice with other elements, such as the psychiatric mood chart in her work in this exhibition, Sis: Prologue (2014), commenting on mental pathology and the gendered body in equal measures. Recent group exhibitions include Heathers, Rowing Projects, London (2014); Pre-Extinct (two-person show with Danny Lane Russell) (2014); Datamine Conflux (curated by Nuno Patricio of Ofluxo), neverlandspace.com (2014); Souldrone/Superdemo (curated by Ian Swanson), adultcontemporary.us (2013); Crazy, Sexy, Cool (curated by Jennifer Chan), .dpi (2013); Pop-up gallery online vol. 1 (curated by Nick Kegeyan), internet-art.net (2013); iShot Andy (curated by Ana Cecilia Alvarez), Recession Art (2013).

Jesse Darling (born 1981 in Oxford, UK) is a British artist, blogger, writer and Internet extraordinaire who lives and works in London after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art earlier this year (MFA) and Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design in 2010 (BA). Darling also attended the Theaterschool in Amsterdam in 2003-2004 and the Gerit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1999-2000. Her work centres around explorations of self in the Internet age and profound thinking about queer politics as well as late capitalism. As the artist puts it, her art addresses “sex, labour, work, trauma, alienation, love, death, physical fragility, mental instability, structural precarity: everything I know about, basically. And more that I’m yet to discover.’ Recent solo shows include those at CAC 41N/41E, Batumi, Georgia (two-person show with Takeshi Shiomitsu) and Lima Zulu, London in 2014, Arcadia Missa, London in 2012 and AiRBase, quartier 21 in Vienna in 2009. Selected group exhibitions include at Luminary Arts Center, St. Louis, MO (2014), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2014); Preteen Gallery @ Arcardia Missa, London (2014); OCAD U, Toronto, Canada (2014); 55 Sydenham Road, Sydney, Australia (2014); KM Temporaer, Berlin, Germany (2014), The Royal Standard, Liverpool, UK (2013); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2013); Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2012); Basic Space, Dublin, Ireland (2011); Grand Rue, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2011); and Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart, Australia (2011). In 2014, Darling has given lectures in the UK at the Serpentine Galleries, Wysing Arts Centre and the David Roberts Arts Foundation and participated in the Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine Galleries during Frieze Week 2014. Darling is represented by Arcadia Missa, London. For this exhibition, Darling, interested in making explicit the physical labour involved in her work, has created a deconstructed architecture of welded steel and other found objects. These angular welded pieces of steel attempt to represent the ungendered body without the exactitude of depiction.

Ludovica Gioscia (born 1977 in Rome, Italy) lives and works in London after graduating from Slade School of Fine Art in 2004 (MFA) and the Chelsea School of Art and Design in 2000 (BA). The Italian artist works in a broad range of media, including photographic collages and mixed media sculptures incorporating textiles, consumer packaging and other design-based elements, but is perhaps best known for making works from her own designed and printed wallpaper, creating vibrant collages and sculptural installations. In her most recent works, such as the installation on the walls of MACRO’s lobby in Rome, Gioscia builds up layers of different patterned wallpaper before ripping them in a ritualistic manner, commenting on the compulsive and voracious nature of today’s mass consumerism. She has crossed many creative disciplines by collaborating with the dance-inspired gallery, Siobhan Davies Studio, London (2009), the fashion brand Stella McCartney (2012), creating bespoke handbags for London Fashion Week, and Sergio Zambon for Galitzine (2014), creating a print used in the Spring/Summer 2014 Collection of this Italian haute couture label. Recent solo shows include Vermilion Glow Bleeds Rust, Riccardo Crespi in Milan (2013), Forecasting Ouroboros, MACRO in Rome (2012) and Papered Portraits, The Warhol in Pittsburgh (2009). Gioscia’s work will be featured in an upcoming solo exhibition at John Jones Project Space, London (November 2014). Her work has been shown as part of group shows at, among others, The American Academy in Rome, Edinburgh College of Art, The Miró Foundation in Barcelona, The Flag Art Foundation in New York, Jerwood Space, South London Gallery and House of Peroni in London, MNAC in Bucharest and Comfort Moderne in Poitiers. In 2013, Gioscia’s first monograph was published by Edizioni Olivares. Gioscia is represented by Galleria Riccardo Crespi in Milan. For this exhibition, responding to her muse Nathalie du Pasquier’s Still Life drawings of, among other things, obsolete Nokia phones, Gioscia has created new sculptures made out of waste- and resin-filled Apple packaging, offering a holistic portrait of the brand and introducing dirt as an interjecting force in an otherwise pristine retail strategy. As a backdrop to these sculptures, Gioscia has wallpapered the walls of the exhibition space with a number of different custom screenprinted wallpapers, including a bootleg of a thunder-like pattern designed by her muse in the 80’s and a new design featuring the Apple logo encrusted with the ashes collected from burnt packaging.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (born 1971 in Chicago) is an American artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She gained her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ mixed media sculptures, ceramics, prints and works on paper are a curious combination of physical gusto tempered by great fragility. Her works act as containers for a wide range of themes – popular and personal, sad and humorous, but always grounded in the messy business of human relationships. She transforms life into art, creating sculptures and collage from everyday objects and marrying the personal quotidian with a wealth of universal themes. Hutchins’ references run from Classical form and literature through medieval manuscript to Objectivist poetry. Her work is informed by the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot as much as by news reportage of current events and sporting triumph. The disclosure of her personal life is a further conceptual and formal basis of her work. Her use of everyday personal objects and materials hint at the dramas of love and family, yet she keeps her references oblique and mysterious, allowing formal qualities free rein to create their own abstract and tactile languages. Hutchins had her first solo exhibition in Europe at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London in 2010. In 2013, Jessica was included in the 55th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale as part of Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace. Past group exhibitions include the 11th Lyon Biennale: A Terrible Beauty is Born (2011); The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Kurt, The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington (2010); Dirt on Delight, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2009); An Expanded Field of Possibilities, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, California (2009). Hutchins had her first solo museum presentation in the UK at The Hepworth Wakefield, which travelled to CentrePasquArt, Kunthaus Centre D’art, Biel/ Bien in Switzerland for the summer of 2013. She has previously had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, the ICA Boston, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Hutchins’ work is in public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery in London and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.

Annie Morris (born 1978 in London) is a British painter and sculptor educated at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Morris works with a variety of media, such as painted postcards and clothespins, to create paintings and sculptures as well as obsessive ink or stitched drawings resting on the border between figuration and abstraction. The subject matter of her work often flows across different media in the same exhibition, leaving the viewer to follow the narrative of the artist’s haunting figures from her drawings through to her sculptures. Through her sculptures, Morris explores the relationship between the second and third dimension, resolving her fascination with art as an object. She has had solo exhibitions at international galleries including at Winston Wachter Gallery, New York (2014 and 2010), Allsopp Contemporary, London (2007), and Lightbox Gallery, LA (2006) as well as taking part in group exhibitions such as What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me, The Fine Art Society Contemporary, London (2014), Sculpture al Fresco III, Marcelle Joseph Projects at Great Fosters, Egham, UK (2013), The British Cut, The Space, Fine Art Society, Hong Kong (2012), MergingBridges, Baku Museum of Modern Art, Baku, Azerbaijan (2012), Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, London (2012), This is London, Shizaru Gallery, London (2012), Artist Launch, 20 Hoxton Square Projects, London (2010), and The Big Rip Off, Camden Arts Centre, London (2010). For this exhibition, Morris has created new stack sculptures originally inspired by her muse Antoni Tapies’ 1988 painting Llit y Colors [Bed and Colors]. Consisting of egg-shaped forms made of plaster and painted with an artist’s palette of different shades of raw pigment, these teetering towers reference childbirth and fragility and allude to realities of personal loss from the artist’s own life. These sculptural works are juxtaposed with Morris’ new Stitch Drawings that combine the spontaneity of ‘automatic’ drawing with the slow, tactile, and expressive nature of stitching. Exploring death and the afterlife, the thread of the Stitch Drawings acts as both a disruption of the original drawing, and a way of mending it, giving it new life. Morris finds inspiration in simple materials and everyday objects and this influence is readily seen in her work – most notably, her clothespin paintings, one of which has been made by the artist for this exhibition.

Nathalie du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France) has lived in Milan since 1979. Until 1987, she worked as a designer and was a founding member of Memphis, an Italian design and architecture group founded in Milan in 1981 that designed post-modern furniture, fabrics, ceramics, glass and metal objects from 1981 to 1987. She designed numerous “decorated surfaces”, including textiles, carpets, plastic laminates and some furniture and other objects Since then, du Pasquier has dedicated herself to painting and more recently to building things. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally including solo shows throughout Italy and in Cologne, Belfast, Paris, Luxembourg, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions in 2014 include Little Message for Modern Shut-Ins, Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles; and A Machinery for Living (organized by Walead Beshty), Petzel Gallery, New York. For this exhibition, artist Ludovica Gioscia has chosen to exhibit alongside her work four recent drawings from du Pasquier’s Still Life series. These drawings depict assemblages of numerous objects, some of which are commercial, alluding to the artist’s history as an important international designer.

Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona,1923-2012) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist who became one of the most well-regarded European artists of his generation. Tàpies’ first artistic attempts began during a long convalescence following a serious illness, after which his increasing dedication to painting and drawing led him to abandon his university education. By the 1940s, he was already exhibiting work that distinguished him among the artistic scene of the moment. Co-founder of the magazine Dau al Set in 1948, and influenced by Miró and Klee, he became increasingly interested in iconographic and magical subjects. He gradually began to incorporate geometrical elements and colour studies leading to an interest in matter through the use of heavily textured canvases of great expressive and communicative possibilities. With these works, Tàpies achieved international recognition by the mid-1950s. In the 1960s, he began incorporating new iconographic elements (writing, signs, anthropomorphic elements, footprints and references to the Catalan situation), and new technical methods (new surfaces, use of everyday objects and varnish). Tàpies’ pictorial language has continued to develop ever since, resulting in a creative and productive body of work that is admired throughout the world. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Serpentine and Hayward Galleries, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstahaus, Zurich: the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Jeu de Paume and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia; and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, among many other prestigious institutions. In parallel to his artistic production, Tàpies is also the author of numerous publications: La pràctica de l’art (1970), L’art contra l’estètica (1974), Memòria personal (1977), La realitat com a art (1982), Per un art modern i progressista (1985), Valor de l’art (1993) and L’art i els seus llocs (1999). Tàpies created the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in 1984 with the aim of promoting the study and knowledge of contemporary art, paying special attention to art’s role in forming the conscience of modern man.

Rosemarie Trockel (born 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) is a German conceptual artist who lives and works in Cologne. She studied from 1974 to 1978 at the Werkkunstschule, Cologne, then heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys. In the early 1980s she came into contact with the Mülheimer Freiheit, a Cologne-based group of painters that included Walter Dahn (b 1954) and she exhibited at the Cologne gallery of Monika Sprüth, who at that time showed only women artists. Trockel has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. At New York's Pat Hearn Gallery in 1987, Trockel's paintings were shown alongside the works of Mary Heilmann, Annette Lemieux, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse. In 1988, as part of the museum's "Projects" series, the Museum of Modern Art offered an extended look at the artist's work made between 1982 and 1987. In 1989, Thomas Krens included her in his show "Refigured Painting: The German Images 1960-88", organized jointly by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art. Trockel was the sole representative of Germany in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and participated in documenta in 1997 and 2012 as well as the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014. In 2012, Trockel work was featured in a retrospective exhibit called “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” at the New Museum in New York, and in 2014, her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Since 1988, she has been a Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She is represented by Sprüth Magers in London and Berlin and Gladstone Gallery in New York. For this exhibition, Trockel chose a monochrome ceramic wall-based work entitled Training (2011) to be shown alongside Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ intricate and tangled sculptural works that incorporate ceramics as well as domestic furniture, textiles and other everyday objects. In this way, Trockel’s work – made from a craft-based gendered medium but classical and masculine in form and composition – acts as a punctuation mark between Jackson Hutchins’ more complex works using the same age-old medium of clay.