The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculptures and wall pieces by Jackie Winsor, on view at 521 West 21st Street from October 25 through November 29, 2008.

Since the late 1960s, Jackie Winsor has been making sculpture that expands a Minimalist vocabulary of simple geometric forms, using unrefined materials and grids to investigate ideas about process and labor. Working by hand and spending years on some pieces, Winsor produces intimate, tactile sculptures that call attention to a complex relationship between interior and exterior. Her early pieces included columns of coiled rope and bound wood trunks. Later, she began to work with burnt, dragged or exploded cubes of wood and cement. In the 1980s, her work turned to polished cement spheres and mirrored cubes with apertures that allowed the eye to peer inside and find finely crafted and colored interiors. This interplay between surface and interior prompts a psychological or emotional suggestion in her work.

In the late 1980s, Winsor began making wall inset pieces that stand between painting and sculpture. Concentric rectangles of wood, plaster, concrete or plexiglass literally recede into the wall, framed by grids or painted borders. These articulations of space carved out of the wall itself serve to open up previously unknown layers of surface. Over parts of these wall pieces Winsor has laid fiber-optic plexiglass, rendering their surfaces simultaneously reflective and transparent. As with her mirrored cubes and polished spheres, these surfaces make self-perception a constitutive part of encountering the work and the environment it inhabits.

The works on view will span Winsor’s career, from a late 1960s rope piece to the most recent wall insets (2000-2001).

In 1970, Winsor participated in the Sculpture Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The artist’s first one-person show with Paula Cooper Gallery was in 1972. She was included in the 1977, 1979, and 1983 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum. At the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1978, she was featured in the show “Made by Sculptors.” In 1979, the Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of her work, the first retrospective show of a female artist in the MoMA’s department of Painting and Scultpure since 1946, which traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas. In 1984, her work was featured in “American Art Since 1970” at the Whitney Museum. P.S. 1 inaugurated its newly renovated space in Long Island City, Queens with a retrospective of her work in 1997. Most recently, her work was included in “Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007) and in “Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s” on view this past summer at the Sculpture Center in New York.