Born in San Francisco in 1974, she lives and works in New York.
Trisha Donnelly makes conceptual work using diverse media and materials: drawings, paintings, photography, sculpture, marble, video, and does performance art.
In 2002 at her New York Gallery, Donnelly appeared on horseback dressed as Napoleon declaring to only be a messenger. The same year, amongst the numerous works shown at her Paris gallery, Air de Paris, a drawing was fixed to the wall reading “RIDR” and entitled Ride into the Dark. In the video Canadian Rain (2002) she made a succession of movements that evoked the martial arts and a mysterious language.
The press release announced that these gestures would cause rain in Canada. Donnelly’s work starts with the premise of an event that cannot be reproduced (no photos exist of these performances) and that an otherwise non communicable message is presented almost as superstition.
From performance to video projection, drawing to sound installations, Trisha Donnelly employs various techniques to create what she calls a sculpture or a “situation sculpture”. Since 2010, she has made stone sculptures, sometimes monumental in scale, with blasting traces, ribbing, ridges and lineaments on the surfaces.
Trisha Donnelly pushes the viewer’s experience to go beyond the simplistic. Reducing conventional visual and linguistic information, she invites us to sharpen our intuition, our memory and use the free association of ideas.
In her recent exhibitions, delicate drawings engraved in marble evoke those of nature and time while seeming to emit sound waves or reveal an image.
From traditional mediums to the most contemporary, like installations, Trisha Donnelly links event and accident, apparition and disappearance, working with the opposition created, and this technique seems to at once communicate and exchange, making a strange flux.
Since 2002, Trisha Donnelly has participated in numerous exhibitions: the Venice Biennale (2001, 2003, and 2013); Carnegie International (2004); the Biennale of Lyon (2003) and Documenta (2012). Starting in 2005, Donnelly has had solo exhibitions in various institutions: Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunsthalle, Zurich (2005); the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (2008); Bologna MAMbo (2009); the Serpentine Gallery (2014); and the Secession of Vienna (2016).
Trisha Donnelly’s residence at the Atelier Calder was an experiment in the immersion into a new cultural, historical and sociological environment.
What interests Donnelly is confronting her work with new types of space that implies new limits and restraints and thusly new responses to the established rules of the exhibition space, usually consecrated to contemplation.
Trisha Donnelly is represented in France by the Air de Paris Gallery
www.airdeparis.com
Related to the residence:
The fifth edition of the Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d’art contemporain, Incorporated (October 1 to December 11, 2016)
www.lesateliersderennes.fr
Max Feed at the FRAC Franche-Comté of Besançon, the first group exhibition related to the work of Max Neuhaus (1939 – 2009), considered the father of sound installation. From October 9 to December 30, 2016
www.frac-franche-comte.fr
HAMLET, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart Robert Ashley, Stephen Dillemuth and Nils Norman, Trisha Donnelly, Easter, Marie-Louise Ekman, Kristina Abelli Elander, Anne Haugsgjerd, Richard Vogel
http://kuenstlerhaus.de October 1 to December 18, 2016