Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present What Looks Back, an exhibition of recent paintings by Josephine Halvorson on view from October 21 to December 3, 2011.

Josephine Halvorson has an itinerant practice. She searches for objects willing to ‘look back’. Working perceptually on site, Halvorson’s paintings contain the reciprocities that develop between artist and object, and become testaments to time spent. The exchanges, which take place in a single session, test the limits of the body, witness the vagaries of weather and light, attract passing strangers, and – when materialized in paint – take on unexpected meanings.

The works on view were made in places as diverse as Shoshone, California; Canaan, New York; Akureyri, Iceland; and Shoreham, England. Halvorson’s explorations are not only geographical, but also psychological. Chance encounters with objects in their environments realize internal glimpses of paintings unmade yet somehow anticipated.

Halvorson considers a painting successful when it asserts a life independent of its power to represent either the original object or the experience of its own making. She hopes these paintings return the attention that produced them and, as a group, evoke an ever-evolving narrative.

Josephine Halvorson holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MFA from Columbia University. She also attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Halvorson is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Vienna, Austria, The Tiffany Foundation Award, a NYFA Fellowship in painting, and has enjoyed yearlong residencies at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in Brooklyn. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Americanana, at Hunter College Art Galleries curated by Katy Siegel and will be featured in the upcoming publication Vitamin P2 published by Phaidon.

Halvorson teaches painting at The Cooper Union and at Princeton University. She also serves as a Core Critic in the MFA program at Yale University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is her second exhibition with Sikkema Jenkins & Co.