SHIRLEY PETTIBONE
CLOTH OBJECTS 1970-1973
Shirley Pettibone: Cloth Objects 1970–1973 presents a focused selection of the artist’s soft sculptural works, developed through her experimentation with stained, cut, and sewn fabric. These “Cloth Objects,” formed from painted muslin and stuffed with batting, occupy a space between painting and sculpture. Neither fully flat nor fully dimensional, they translate painterly gesture into bodily form.
As described in Pettibone’s own reflections, these works emerged from a desire to move beyond the limitations of traditional painting, incorporating physical substance while retaining a sense of ambiguity and poetic suggestion. The resulting forms—tubular, knotted, or suspended—evoke bodily associations without resolving into explicit representation. They suggest skin, organs, or organic growths, while also maintaining a formal rigor aligned with the conceptual concerns of the period.
Pettibone’s use of sewing and fabric introduces a material language historically coded as feminine, transforming it into a structural and conceptual device. The works engage with contemporaneous movements such as “Eccentric Abstraction” and “Soft Sculpture,” yet remain distinct in their synthesis of intimacy, process, and restraint. Despite their innovation, these works were created within a context in which women artists were often marginalized, their contributions overlooked in favor of their male counterparts.
Shirley Pettibone: Cloth Objects will be on view at Duane Thomas Gallery from May 15 through June 15 2026
EUNICE GOLDEN
WORKS 1970-1973
Eunice Golden: Works 1970–1973 focuses on a selection of works produced during a pivotal moment in the artist’s early career. These works explore fragmented, eroticized, and often monumentalized representations of the male body. Golden’s works resist both classical figuration and purely abstract form, instead occupying a charged space between the two. Limbs, torsos, and suggestive anatomical forms emerge and dissolve across the surface, destabilizing conventional hierarchies of looking and desire.
At a time when depictions of the male nude by women artists were rare, Golden’s drawings assert a reversal of the traditional gaze. The works are at once intimate and confrontational, combining a meticulous attention to surface with an unapologetic engagement with sexuality. Rather than presenting the body as fixed or idealized, Golden renders it unstable—cropped, enlarged, and psychologically loaded—anticipating later developments in feminist art while remaining largely unrecognized within its dominant narratives.
The exhibition will be on view at Duane Thomas Gallery from May 15 through June 15, 2026.