14th Shanghai Biennale

14th Shanghai Biennale
Cosmos Cinema
November 9, 2023–March 31, 2024

Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China

Solo Exhibition at Kai Matsumiya Gallery:The Hard Problem, May 11th-June 17 2023

Less is a Bore at the ICA

So thrilled to be included in this show full of my heroes!

Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design
Jun 26 – Sep 22, 2019
Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Karen and Brian Conway Galleries
Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
#Lessisabore

interview with Alec Dartley in North of the Internet

Thanks so much for this wonderful interview with Alec Dartley!

deCordova Museum New England Biennial

So thrilled to be a part of the New England Biennial at the deCordova Museum, open from April 5- September 15, 2019. Thanks so much to curator Sarah Montross!

Shifting Sets reviewed by Barry Schwabsky in Art Forum

I am grateful for Barry Schwabsky's thoughtful and insightful review in Art Forum!

Shifting Sets reviewed by John Yau in Hyperallergic

So thrilled about this beautifully written and very insightful essay by John Yau!

Shifting Sets reviewed in the New York Times

So thrilled to have my show "Shifting Sets" at Kai Matsumiya reviewed by Will Heinrich in the New York Times:

It took Zoe Pettijohn Schade as long as a year and a half to make each of the intricate large gouaches in “Shifting Sets,” a show lining the walls of Kai Matsumiya’s tidy Stanton Street gallery. Weirdly timeless meditations on death, they simultaneously evoke cutting-edge Photoshop effects and rococo wallpaper, with tiled and overlapping imagery that includes skulls from the Parisian catacombs; toy army men in marbleized silhouette; and delicate, color-graded pigeon feathers modeled on one blackening example the artist found in her garden.
What’s most fascinating, though, isn’t the pieces’ nominal content so much as the seeming evanescence of the labor that went into them: If you lean in close, you can see every semi-opaque brush stroke in every pale gray feather, but from any greater distance, such small evidences of the artist’s time and attention disappear in the overall dazzle.
The same kind of visual dynamic flickers across the whole of “Crowd of Crowds: 100th Monkey” (2017), which is covered in diagonal rows of grimacing, long-tailed primates. Because some of them are ghostly gray, and others mere silhouettes filled in with more feathers, skulls, or tombstones, it can take minutes of staring to notice just how simple the pattern is. WILL HEINRICH

Solo show: Shifting Sets at Kai Matsumiya Gallery

I am to be presenting my second solo show at Kai Matsumiya Gallery!

SHIFTING SETS
Opening: March 30th, 6-8PM
March 30th - May 6th

Kai Matsumiya Gallery presents Zoe Pettijohn Schade’s “Shifting Sets”, the artist’s second solo show at the gallery. The exhibition features two new large paintings that are continuations of the “Crowd” series that was the basis for her first solo show at the gallery. Schade’s two new works will be joined by the five large paintings that Pettijohn Schade has made since 2005, most of which have never been shown, and are generously being loaned to the gallery by their private collectors. Each of these seven large paintings is the culmination of the artist working through all the variables in the series of smaller paintings that preceded it: this is the first time they will be assembled as a group.
Schade has spent years studying systems of pattern formation. She began by studying textiles and textile history, and through this study discovered the tradition of gouache paintings for textile patterns. For Schade, this obscure painting tradition has been revelatory for its complex structures, adventurous approach to mixing geometric abstraction and descriptive representations of objects and creatures, and its elaborate vocabulary of marks. Her research led to a Fulbright Research Scholar’s Grant in 2013 to spend 6 months at the Bibliotheque Forney in Paris working with a rare collection of anonymous gouache paintings for textiles from the 1700s. Her analysis of patterns has enabled her to find links between the structure and behavior of cells, networks, and information. Each painting involves an in depth exploration of a family, or set, of structures and images, and takes about a year and a half to complete.
Schade’s mode of working is marked by meticulous craft, reviving such ancient techniques as marbling and gilding. Maximal density is achieved through multi-levels of repeating imagery, with the structure of each layer as considered as the image itself. The disparate strata interact, testing the limits of the system she has created and causing unexpected patterns and associations to emerge. Embedded images hide in plain sight then rise to the eye at their own pace.

153 ½ Stanton Street
New York, York 10002
info@kaimatsumiya.com
+1 617 678 4440
www.kaimatsumiya.com
Wed – Sun 12- 6 pm

Artforum Best of 2015 by Matthew Higgs

I am so thrilled and honored that Matthew Higgs inlcuded my show "Crowds" at Kai Matsumiya Gallery in his "Best of 2015" in December's issue of Artforum.

Looking Back/ 10th White Columns Annual- Selected by Matthew Higgs

So honored to have been selected for this great show!
 

NYFA Fellowship in Painting

So thrilled and honored to announce that I am a 2015 Fellow in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts!

Purple Magazine: Purple Diary- Zoe Pettijohn Schade "CROWDS" at Kai Matsumiya Gallery, New York
Review of "Crowds" in the New Yorker!
"Contradictory Patterns and Decorative Illusions"

A fabulous review by Patrick Neal on Hyperallgeric!

W Magazine: "Zoe Pettijohn Schade's Artful Histories" by Vincent Dilio and Kat Herriman
Zoe Pettijohn Schade: CROWDS at Kai Matsumiya Gallery


CROWDS (Thursday, March 26th - Saturday, May 9th)
 
Kai Matsumiya presents Zoe Pettijohn Schade’s solo exhibition “Crowds” at the space and will represent its first pure painting presentation. The verb “crowd” overwhelms and preoccupies, and as a noun, it refers to a large number of things collectively. These works uncover the complex relationships among structural patterning and its disruptions.

The weaving of images that are loaded with associations (monkeys, cotton-candy colored tombstones, feathers, decapitated kings, etc.) creates a dense field of relationships and meanings that are conceptually/historically rich. The images and the structures that organize them explore both the aspirations and the pitfalls of order. Her work is extremely labor intensive, as a painting (16”x22”) requires nearly two months for completion, and is composed of layers of images each of which is invented and executed by hand.

For the past decade the artist has been researching the obscure tradition of French gouache pattern painting for textiles from the 18th and 19th centuries.  This work led to a Fulbright Research Scholars Grant to Paris in 2013, during which she strove to absorb the wild visual invention and genre disrupting approach of these anonymous painters and trained her hand in their language of intricate mark making. As an acknowledgement to her inspiration from this tradition, the show will include nine paintings from the early 1800s, courtesy of the Design Library in Wappingers Falls, NY, the world’s largest collection of design patterns. The exhibition will also present her meticulous studies in the form of drawings.

Reflecting on her work, Pettijohn Schade writes: “I try to achieve maximal density of layers in my paintings, both as a reflection of our experience in an image saturated world, and as a model of the structure of the unconscious. The unconscious is a potent reference for me in that it is a space where images and associations accrete and exert a kind of furtive power, like an elemental force that colors meaning.”

Crowds is scheduled to open on March 26th. (7:00-9:30). Please email info@kaimatsumiya.com or call (617) 678 4440 for more details

Zoe Pettijohn Schade in the New York Times Magazine

Now That’s Old-School
By Maud Newton
In an art world that encourages hugeness, the painter Zoe Pettijohn Schade emphasizes tiny repeating forms, juxtaposing hungry sharks against the most intricate lace. She takes inspiration, she tells Bomb magazine, from textiles and 18th-century gouache pattern paintings and from echoes of those patterns in present-day life. Then and now, repetition and hidden understructures soothe us as monsters play and “hide in plain sight.”

Interview by Alyssa Fanning on Bomblog

Very excited about this great article!

Mona Bismarck American Center Exhibition, First Floor Salon

Solo Show at the Mona Bismarck Center for American Art and Culture in Paris, runs through May 19th

Fulbright U.S. Research Scholars Grant

I am excited to announce that I have been awarded the 2012-13 Fulbright U.S. Scholars Grant to Paris. It is to continue my drawings of a rare collection of gouache pattern paintings from the 1700s at the Bibliothèque Forney, and make full scale paintings in response. The grant is for six months beginning in February, 2013. I am so thrilled and honored!