There’s a painting in Sofia Quirno’s new show at Praxis called Atado con alambre (2018). The square, 48-inch canvas has what looks like an aquamarine pillow string-tied to a blue pipe, while an indistinguishable black object sits in the foreground. Roughly translated to “tied with wire,” the work is named after a Spanish saying that connotes an object that’s barely being held in place, as if jury-rigged together with a temporary, ad-hoc solution.
It’s a good metaphor for the Argentina-born, New York-based artist’s work. Mixing and matching everday objects in playful ways, Quirno’s paintings often appear is if they’re tied together with wire. It’s one of their strongest qualities.
The exhibition brings together roughly a dozen new paintings, drawings, and site-specific installations. The show’s title, “Heads and Tails,” is a reference to what Quirno considers the “in-between state” in which her work lives.
“Art, for me, is a space of possibility,” she says. “The kind of imagery I create exists in a space of in-between, where there are objects that seem recognizable, but they are not always easy to pin down. When you throw a coin into the air and it hasn’t yet revealed if it’s going to be heads or tails, there’s all these possibilities in between, all these worlds available. It’s about the idea that it doesn’t have to be one or the other; it doesn’t have to have a definition.”
