Paul Wackers: The Space We Take

Opening Saturday, May 15th, 3 - 5 pm

Eleanor Harwood Gallery is thrilled to present The Space We Take, the gallery’s seventh solo show with Paul Wackers, marking 15 years of working together. The body of work in The Space We Take was painted during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020/2021 in its American epicenter, New York City. In his new works Wackers’ long-term inquiry into imaginative domestic tableaus, the tradition of still life painting and the creation of a personal visual lexicon takes on new meaning when set against the backdrop of social isolation and stay at home orders. 

Interior space has long been central in the work of Paul Wackers and while The Space We Take continues this long held formal line of inquiry, shifts in composition and color choice point to the artist’s personal reckoning with the isolation during the Coronavirus pandemic. At this unique moment in history the human relationship to domestic space became loaded with emotions and meaning. These works, produced in isolation, have a longing and confusion in them—a certain compression of space that offers both a sanctuary and a pointed accounting of objects within the personal domestic sphere.

The new interior palette is radiant, perhaps in contrast to how Wackers was feeling during an intense lock-down in New York City. He recalls that over the course of the pandemic he shared only fifteen meals with others, a striking personal detail that so clearly illuminates the strange singularity of daily pandemic life. In contrast to the image of solitary meals, these paintings contain brighter colors than usual—more joyful and warm colors—a transformation that can be read as the artist replacing the vividness of external life by adding color into his studio practice.

On the social spectrum of isolation, these paintings come from the end that was populated with few other people. In the painting “The Space We Take” two plants grow side-by-side, situated in an alcove. They jockey for space, yet somehow still thrive; not in ground soil, but in pots, dependent on someone to water them. Nurture is necessary for all of us, be it water for plants, or contact for humans and the growing plants become a metaphor for both the care and the space we all need. The eponymous title of the painting and show is charged. The “Space We Take” refers to the six feet of distance necessary for safety, the feeling of being forced to move off a sidewalk when someone maskless walks in your way, making it their space as you move aside. But it also points to the space we need to grow.

What we have all lacked in saturation in our personal lives, the artist has painted back in, both for himself, and for us. Wackers’ continued and deepened accounting of his personal space shows us someone making a safe space for themselves. We are reminded of how that space is precious and that what we do in it or with it matters.

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