Sonya Rapoport: Fabric Paintings

Opening Reception | Saturday, December 11th, 2021 | 3–5 pm

Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to present Sonya Rapoport: Fabric Paintings. The exhibition features rarely-seen sculptural canvases and bold painting on patterned fabric by the late Bay Area artist Sonya Rapoport (1923-2015).

First shown in 1967, Rapoport’s Fabric Paintings represents a radical departure for the artist who had previously been recognized as an Abstract Expressionist painter. This exhibition reveals the origin of Rapoport’s systematic abstraction of the female form and her first experiments with painting on found materials.

Rapoport’s paintings anticipate the Pattern and Decoration movement of the mid-1970s, which explored textiles and ornamentation. While shopping for quilting materials with her daughter, Rapoport encountered gaudy, commercially printed upholstery fabric, and challenged herself to create “ostensibly respectable abstractions” on this “kinky” substrate. The resulting dimensional paintings seemingly owe much to the sculptural excesses and junk-store aesthetics of funk art. Although Rapoport was not considered to be part of this movement, curator Peter Selz of the Berkeley Art Museum credited her with suggesting the title Funk for his seminal exhibition, which had opened earlier in 1967.

The curvy organic shapes in Rapoport’s Fabric Paintings can be traced back to large scale drawings and collages from 1964, with titles such as Incubation. A male critic of the day referred to these as “floral-sexual blends,” and made much of what he saw as “bosoms and derrieres", a nod to the steep climb Rapoport faced as a female artist. In the early 1970s Rapoport made these forms central to her practice, creating a set of stencils that she deployed as a feminist pattern language.

In 2012, Rapoport was invited to exhibit this work at Fresno Art Museum. Informed by a career of conceptual experiments, interactive new media work, and deep engagement with feminist themes, Rapoport created a new piece, ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?. These collages superimposed photographs of her Fabric Paintings onto advertisements from The New York Times that targeted women, each matched with an evocative (or pernicious) marketing slogan. In an accompanying interactive “data-gathering event,” Rapoport asked viewers to create their own matches, a tactic she had been using since gathering “soft material” about viewers’ personal feelings, experiences, and domestic situations in her computer-mediated “audience participation performances” of the early 1980s. 

Sonya Rapoport: Fabric Paintings spans 50 years of work from one of the most innovative artists to emerge in California. Featuring rarely seen artwork, it traces the development of Rapoport’s feminist consciousness from her initial rejection of conventional painting through the sophisticated cultural criticism that characterizes her mature work.

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