What would the self-portrait of a thought look like?

Momenta Art is pleased to announce Suddenly, new paintings by Mira Schor, Schor’s first one-person show in New York in over a decade. These works mark a departure in Schor’s work, from the depiction of language as image to the suggestion of its lack in a space where we expect to see it. Suddenly, marks the moment when personal loss or political babble creates a loss for words. Schor has turned to the most basic form that came to mind: the empty thought balloon, where language was or will or should be.

Richly surfaced, bold, witty, notational, provisional, the paintings in this show were made in quick gestures, taking five minutes to an afternoon. They function unpredictably, as existential encounters that emerge from political absurdities or epochal tragedies – experienced in the everyday.

A conceptual artist who is a painter’s painter, a feminist who is an odd inheritor of the approaches to painting of the New York School, a noted writer on both feminism and painting, Mira Schor has long worked at the razor’s edge between visual and verbal languages. Her paintings have been foregrounded by these various disciplines: by painting, with shows such as Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, at P.S.1; by feminism, with shows such as Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” in Feminist Art History, at the Armand Hammer Museum; and by language, with shows such as Poetry Plastique, at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/ Schor has two new books coming out in 2009, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, which she has edited, from Yale University Press, and a new collection of her own writings on art and culture, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, to be published by Duke University Press.