Leaky Abstraction Book Launch with Ana Cardoso and Maika Pollack

Join us on Thursday, May 8 at 7pm for a conversation between artist Ana Cardoso and art historian, critic, and curator Maika Pollack. The pair will discuss Cardoso's recent exhibition Leaky Abstraction and an accompanying artist's book produced in collaboration with Ana Baliza, with texts by Pollack, William J. Simmons, and João Pinharanda.

Leaky Abstraction (maat, 29/03–04/09/2023), an exhibition by Ana Cardoso, is based on the artist’s research around the medium of painting. Exploring optical illusions allowed by the geometry of forms and a gestural and material based painting, Cardoso combines and simultaneously sabotages historical solutions of hard-edge and abstract painting with craft based practices: mixing or connecting dyed and hand-woven unpainted canvases with hand-painted industrial canvases, for instance. In her work, abstraction is grounded by a structure regulated by modular and geometric forms that are both independent and generic (although defined by the artist)—references to the history of abstraction, formalist strategies, etc.—as propositions for and of the body.

Ana Cardoso's (b. 1978, Lisbon, 1978; lives and works in New York and Lisbon) practice focuses on abstraction, performance, and installation through an investigation of painting and its limits in specific contexts. Cardoso dismantles the traditional quadrangular forms of the medium and, far from all geometry, approaches organic or material solutions. With an MFA in Painting (Hunter College, New York) and a BA in Painting (Fine Arts School – University of Lisbon), Ana Cardoso was a grantee of the Pollock Krasner Foundation (New York, 2019-2020) and a finalist of the 2017 EDP Foundation New Artists Award. Among the venues where her work was exhibited are the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2019), Parapet Real Humans (St. Louis, 2018), Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (Lisbon, 2015), The Kitchen (New York, 2009).

Maika Pollack is an art historian, critic, and curator. She served as director and chief curator of the John Young Museum of Art and University Galleries at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu, and Executive Director of the Syracuse University Art Museum. Prior to those roles she founded and directed Southfirst, a gallery in Brooklyn, from 2000-2018. Her writing has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Frieze, Artforum, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Aperture, BOMB, New York Observer, The New York Times, and Interview Magazine, among other publications.