Pauline Stella Sanchez

Selected Works     Biography     Press Release

May 13 - June 26, 1999

Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Pauline Stella Sanchez's, 13,330 plus elemental artworks series entitled "Items for 'that' ...shine palace..."

Sanchez's drawings, sculpture, digital imagery and installation involve a synthesized labyrinth of abstract and representational visuals that hint at a paradoxical recognition of art and design history, science and transcendental coding. Just as you think her works are to be taken extremely seriously, you'll see moments of her humor squeeze out at you. Her works since 1989 have been contingent upon each other and interlock and refer back to each other like a puzzle maze. Works like "wiz...POP" featured in Selections Spring '97, at the Drawing Center here in New York and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, research and explore geometry and its hypotheses of compacted space and how perception realities are involved in that space physically. Sanchez's works explore how the fine lines between perception realities, those that are thought of as fiction and those as non-fiction, reflect, imitate, and exchange into each other spatially.

The 20th Century has brought us an abundance of art and Sanchez is interested in notating how the dreams and desires of alchemy and transcendence have developed a hidden system of abstract codes within that history, even those histories that swallow them up like style. Sanchez's works purposefully and absurdly show us that these abstract codes can lead us somewhere and nowhere and that the road in her maze is a maze in itself. Her works reveal a knowing preposterousness of evermore labyrinths of visual codes and then back again to discoveries. The work is accessible in that it seduces the viewer, "Pauline Stella Sanchez's work dazzles" writes Bruce Hainley of Artforum, yet it demands

a concentrated and questioning viewing. "... just as she blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, outside and in, she dissolves, movie-star-like, the hierarchy of person and persona: Sanchez herself may be only a stunt double, for her installations are the pre- and postperformance paraphernalia of a character... who only appears photographically in the tiny, hazy, erotic "1990 Portrait of Me on The Sun...," 1990-96," Hainley adds. The artist held the photograph for almost seven years before public viewing. This new exhibition will see the photograph in an insinuated new form.

Pauline Stella Sanchez is a Los Angeles based artist who is faculty at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, since 1990 and is just finishing a year as the Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She received her MFA from UCLA in the late 1980's and has since been exhibiting in venues in Los Angeles, Europe and South America. This is a long awaited solo exhibition of Sanchez's work for many here in New York. Sanchez has been the recipient of several awards including a NEA and a Cartier.