Catalogue Essay: “Lisa Nankivil”

Jerome Foundation Fellowship Exhibition

Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Fall 2005

by Kristin Makholm, Ph.D.

If home is where the vertical meets the horizontal, as the art historian John Berger put it, then Lisa Nankivil has found her perfect pied-a-terre. Physically, her sensuous stripe paintings engage one or the other of these axes: the horizontal stripes recalling landscape, horizon, the pensive gaze: the vertical ones, a curtain or scrim inhibiting our view beyond, the alert body. Yet this home in Nankivil’s paintings, this “foot on the earth” as the French say, is more than simply a compositional imperative, a systematic application of bands and stripes on canvas. Like paintings by Piet Mondrian or Agnes Martin, there is a metaphysical element that comes into play when the vertical and horizontal intersect, a spiritual urge for the perfection of geometry in our own chaotic existence.

Nankivil enacts this tension through stripes that refuse to behave. Her compositions are consistently tactile, corporeal, often messy and indistinct, a physical place where our bodies are rooted in the world. Like Venetian blinds the stripes obscure layers and dimensions beneath their surface, colors and gestures swerve and interweave in the interstices, breaking up and disturbing what form attempts to contain. Nankivil alters the dimensions and orientations of her paintings to strengthen the perpendicular join of each work, as in 90 Degrees of Observance, which allows the horizontal to soar 12 feet into the air, seemingly unencumbered and weightless. Always directed back at the earth and our human mass, Nankivil’s paintings remind us of the striving for something beyond that is also precisely within our grasp.

About the author:

Kristin Makholm, Ph.D., earned her bachelor’s degree in art history from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. and her master’s degree and doctorate in art history from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. A specialist in modern and contemporary art, she served in curatorial positions at the St. Louis Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum, and as director of gallery and exhibitions at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is currently Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Minnesota.