Julia Haft-Candell

CANDICE MADEY is pleased to announce the gallery’s second solo exhibition with LA-based Julia Haft-Candell, A Soft Grid, presenting new mixed media paintings that incorporate marble dust and bronze, sculpture in bronze and clay, and a large-scale work on paper. Throughout this exhibition and her work in general, a recurring lexicon traverses material form and connects the non corporeal and more ethereal aspects of her practice.

Acts of self-apprenticeship led Haft-Candell to materialize new shapes across these various dimensions, organized here through warped netting motifs. Crisscrossing patterns emerge in blue pigment and black patinas or are dug out with a sharp tool to reveal depth and play with illusions of volume. As if pulling the rug out from underneath the traditional fine arts, or excavating not-yet solidified traditions, Haft-Candell burrows into and blows up the sketch–detaching grid lines from their forced regularity.

Instead, vitality springs from the artist’s focus on the way interlocking gestures inform her lumpy (w)holes. Unevenly skewed bronze spheres seep from canvas and clay, revealing mini honey-gold bumps unashamedly reveling in their messy irregularities. Watercolor floats on a linen surfaces lined with a gritty gesso, welcoming chalk and marble dust, further elevating what once was lost to the ether into the position of fine art.

Haft-Candell received an MFA from California State University Long Beach and BA in Studio Art and International Relations from University of California Davis, and is an alumni of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Parrasch Heijen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and group exhibitions at Canada Gallery, New York, NY; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY; Bushel Collective, Delhi, NY; 12.26, Dallas, TX; CANDICE MADEY, New York, NY; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton CA; the Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA; Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY; among others. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Surface Magazine, East of Borneo, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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