For Frieze Los Angeles 2019, Night Gallery will present new paintings by Claire Tabouret. Throughout her career, Tabouret’s acrylic paintings have depicted bodies in space, investigating the transfer of energies between individuals and their surroundings as well as with one another. The sweeping, gestural strokes in which they are painted are reminders of the artist’s own physicality, mapping the dancerly motion by which she creates her large-scale images and drawing a parallel between her spatial navigations and her subjects’. At Frieze LA, Tabouret presents a body of work that places special emphasis on fabric as a sensory and corporeal substance. Some portraits are painted on fleece cloth, its rough textural inconsistencies creating a relief that allows for unexpectedly impressionistic renderings. One such painting depicts a bather drying in the sun, her body catching the its rays in a vivid rainbow of colors. In both depiction and material, the painting reminds the viewer of the sensuality of skin, as the painting’s towel-like material conjures a visceral impression of warmth after bathing. Frieze LA also finds Tabouret returning to the monumental group portraits for which she is known, presenting harmonious clusters of individuals whose presences are defined in relation to one another, both through overt physical contact and through the subtle but significant postures they assume within the composition. Here Tabouret paints images of athletic teams inspired by found photographs. These paintings feature thick, flat applications of paint to conjure the texture of fabric, breaking from realism to unite her figures through purely formal means. The works are stunning testaments to the place of the individual amid the upsweep of the collective and the figurative logic that allows us to hold space while sharing it.
