Alisa Margolis

Dur­ing a two-year stay in Ams­ter­dam, Alisa Margo­lis (1975, Ukraine) dis­cov­ered the paint­ings of the “Golden Age”—the 17th-century Dutch art that artic­u­lated the cultural, social, and polit­ical identity of a trad­ing nation that had become a world power. She began to use Dutch flo­ral still lifes as a springboard for her own works. With a spe­cial focus on dramatic light­ing, she eventu­ally cre­ated a style that combined the Low Countries’ meticulousness with the gestu­ral impul­sivity of US Abs­tract Expres­sion­ism, contrasting, for exam­ple, tri­an­gu­lar fil­i­gree com­po­si­tions con­tain­ing count­less thin lay­ers of almost translu­cent paint with gestu­ral and entirely non-rep­re­senta­tional brushwork.