It is with great pleasure that Tif Sigfrids presents our first solo exhibition with Gracie DeVito in our new location. The show, entitled Semifreddo, will open with a reception on January 19th from 4-6 PM and remain on view through March 2nd.

In current matters of space and time, deftly tucked away from a world of likes, swipes and scrolls, remains a state of the unmediated and unfinished. Paint brushed onto canvas, canvas cut and inscribed, frame formed to these incisions, wiggles not straight edges. It’s important that there are very few straight lines in this body of work, that the frame seems to be the only element regulating a boundary of something that could otherwise extend indefinitely.

DeVito rather forcefully evokes the strangeness of the visual world with paintings that whisper to you — you are not bound to this world as you are. Fleeting, whispy, semi-transparent brush strokes. Applied with a slow confident hand, not eager to rush off anywhere else. You can feel the artist’s presence, but there is more room for the viewer’s eye, and body, to roam and shift through the tenuously concocted world of swirling color masses and diverging lines.

In this sense, these paintings work as improvisational landscapes, delivering the effect that each one feels like a memory of a field, a forest, a lake, that you have never actually been to. Occasionally a figure emerges, makes it clear that the pictorial can exist within the abstract but does not have to dominate it. In this sense DeVito accomplishes a tricky balance, the reciprocation between image and abstraction, taking us back and forth. The emergence of a figure or recognizable object surfaces and easily shifts back into the equally powerful landscape of abstract lines, forms and volumes.

-Anna Hermann

Gracie DeVito (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles. She has performed and exhibited work recently at Tif Sigfrids, Nicelle Beauchene, 356 Mission, Commonwealth and Council, Claremont College, and The Torrance Art Museum. Gracie received an MFA from CalArts in 2012.