Whitney Claflin
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1983
United States
Drei
Whitney Claflin (b. 1983, Providence, Rhode Island) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. The artist’s work is currently on view in a two person exhibition with Rochelle Feinstein at Drei, Cologne, and recently had been on view in solo exhibitions and presentations at Bodega (now Derosia), New York (2021); Soft Opening, London (both 2020); and Central Fine, Miami Beach (2019). She furthermore recently contributed to exhibitions at Sandy Brown, Berlin (2021); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2020); Galerie Buchholz, New York (2019); Croy Nielsen, Vienna; and Greene Naftali, New York (both 2018) a.o.
Jacqueline, 2022
Magazine clippings on sunglasses on mannequin
51,5 × 27 × 20 cm (without stand)
Claflin's work gives body to conflict, amplifies subjectivity, and highlights the feedback-looping maximalisms of the moment. Non paint materials are collected from her everyday and contribute to a work which is useful to think of as “mostly painting” – a guide, a mix tape, asking you to consider one thing and then the next while you still have the last thing stuck in your head.
Jacqueline, 2022 (detail)
'Stabler Horizon'
Whitney Claflin & Rochelle Feinstein
Conceived in collaboration with Fabrice Stroun
April 28 - July 16, 2022
Drei, Cologne
Front:
Rochelle Feinstein, Golden Moments / Silver Linings, 2022
Polaroids, laminated, alligator clips on hand dyed yarn, embroidery floss on wire
185 × 20 × 6 cm
Back:
Whitney Claflin One Star, 2022
Oil on wood panel
20 × 25,5 cm
“⌈…⌉This exhibition will paint pictures of New York, a city that has been a beacon of advanced art-making in our collective imagination for generations. A picture of a city that is long past the decades-long stagnant ideological malaise that followed the relatively short-lived post-war triumphalism. A city that has become culturally and economically deeply inhospitable to its artists, and where the daily activity of making art has become a daily struggle. While these pictures can be grating, they are not so much bleak as resilient. Each canvas ⌈…⌉ is animated by a wry, but also at times biting or bittersweet humor; they are, in Claflin’s words, “moments between raindrops'', generative of a potentially intense private exchange between the artist and the viewer. And, from one work to the next, emerge as the building-blocks of what being in the world together might look like.“
Fabrice Stroun on 'Stabler Horizon', Drei, Cologne, 2022
Neither Behemoth, 2022
Ink, collage on paper
30 × 22,5 cm / 33,5 × 26 cm (framed)
Union, 2022
Inkjet print on Avery labels
28 × 21,5 cm / 31 × 25 cm (framed)
'ADD SHOT'
Whitney Claflin
October 30, 2020 - January 16, 2021
Bodega (now Derosia), New York
Mime in a Merry-Go-Round, 2020 (detail)
Custom shirt, skirt, bra, underwear, bag, mannequin, plinth and mix on headphones
191 × 150 × 135 cm
Whitney Claflin, civ, 2018
Acrylic, cigarette filters, wire, cigarette papers on linen
28 × 40 cm
“For Claflin painting is always an open ended; the artist knows this and seizes it wholeheartedly. Why accept completion if completion is to willingly accept the demands of production and consumption? Claflin’s works all embody their own mood, so much so that the mood becomes a being itself. The additional (non-oil paint) materials of Claflin’s work are collected from her everyday, and the paintings are a part of and a witness to that life. They are lived with in order to be made, and that leaves them capable of occupying a sense of being, because maybe that’s what their unending process is, a lifespan.“
Rozsa Farkas, 2019
Untitled (HORNY AGAIN), 2019
Iron on letters on found shirt on on hanger
65 x 43 cm
"I can anticipate the loss of income, self-isolate to reduce costs, and focus on painting. I eat two meals a day—oatmeal and lentils from the rice cooker—follow a free yoga channel on YouTube to out-zen the precarity, and ration the weed."
Whitney Claflin, Artforum, 2020
Whitney Claflin, Chore Chart, 2022
Oil, graphite, ink, colored pencil on canvas
86 × 86 cm