Ezra Tessler
Ezra Tessler
Workspace Program Resident 2019
After an extensive period of testing techniques and materials, Amy and I centered our studio days in two main areas, pulling colorful abaca sheets and casting cotton in urethane molds made specifically for the residency.
I made the works that appear in the final exhibition by casting the irregular shapes, wrapping them in pulp-painted abaca, and integrating additional cast and handmade parts. In these small-scale works, rough-hewn forms cross the bright surfaces, offering condensed panoramas of unfamiliar places. My hope is that the shape and angles of the work –along with the things taking place on top of and within these surfaces –can offer a material bridge to unfamiliar experiences. In this sense, they are my attempt to provide an experience as well as analogy for addressing ourselves, each other, and the world in more active and open-ended ways.
Most importantly, I want to thank Dieu Donné for its incredible generosity and hospitality during the residency. I also want to thank Amy Jacobs, whose kindness, generosity, creative guidance, openness to experimentation, backbreaking work, and artistic vision made this work possible. She is just as much the creator of this work as I am, and I feel lucky to be able to call myself her collaborator.
—Ezra Tessler, 2019
Ezra Tessler’s work explores the relationship between image and object with a series of colorful, small-scale three-dimensional paper works. His painting practice proceeds from the basic fact that a painting is both an image and an object. Like their makers, paintings have faces and outward identities but also bodies, inner lives, and complicated backstories. The technical challenges of building a support and then painting on it, however, makes it difficult to bridge the boundaries between these realms.
Tessler’s aim in applying to the Workspace Residency was that paper could offer insight and inspiration for his larger practice with paper being both support and surface at the same time. With this idea in mind, he and collaborator Amy Jacobs created a series of opportunities to experiment wildly with the physical possibilities of paper pulp in the professional studio. Through the unpredictability and speed of papermaking he developed more dynamic links between the materials used and their shapes and treatment. This process offered a kind of embodied immediacy that he had long aspired to in his work.
In the Studio
About the Artist
Ezra Tessler (b. 1980, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York. He completed his MFA in painting from Bard College in 2016 and holds previous degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. Tessler worked in human rights in Latin America, Russia, and Central Asia for a number of years before completing his MFA in painting at Bard College in 2016.
His recent solo and two-person shows include Ezra Tessler and Barb Smith, New Proposals with Páramo at Zsona Maco, Mexico City, 2016; Rafters at Culture Room, Brooklyn, NY, 2014; The Red-Haired Man at Good Weather, North Little Rock, AR, 2013. His recent group shows include Beholder's Share at 315 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2016; Everything Real at Hap Gallery, Portland, OR, 2016; Broadcast from Cedarburg, NJ, Bannerette, Brooklyn, 2016; Shades at The Bedfellows' Club, Little Rock, AR, 2016; and Painters NYC, Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños (MUPO), Oaxaca, Mexico, 2016. He has been the recipient of a Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and a Pforzheimer Foundation Fellowship, among other awards. (Source: Jack Barrett Gallery)
For more information, please visit their website: https://www.ezratessler.com/