MARCIA HAFIF

Marcia Hafif studied at University California, Irvine from 1969-71 before moving to SoHo, where her experiences of the NY artworld led her to believe modern abstract painting had been exhausted. It was this conclusion that compelled her to begin working in monochrome (which she would do almost exclusively for the rest of her career). However, she was convinced that the label of monochrome was also insufficient to describe her practice, especially after experimenting with creating her own paints by mixing pigments with oil, where she found nuance in the particularities of each pigment and their difference from the material properties of readily available manufactured paints. Following this, Hafif did almost nothing between 1972-73 but paint in gradations from black to white, creating An Extended Gray Scale comprised of one hundred and six 22 x 22 paintings. She would then exhibit with Sonnabend in Paris and New York for nearly a decade, from 1974-1981, developing her work into an all-inclusive project dubbed The Inventory, of which An Extended Gray Scale is a part along with a separate category for 3D works.

Analytic and conceptually driven, Hafif would also contribute to the discourse of the period, stating in here influential artforum essay “Beginning Again” from their Sept. 1978 issue that “If one phase of this period of analysis is coming to an end, we may be ready to enter still another phase of abstraction, a synthetic period.” Reflecting again on her work in 1989, having moved through the historical trajectories of painting being questioned of its relevance, she stated “I do not paint with the intention of making a painting as such, but I work from the outside using traditional methods and materials to discover a new image.”

In 2016 the show “Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings, 1961–1969” opened at Fergus McCaffrey in NY and presented a body of her work that had gone unseen by the American public since they were created, but which provided firm evidence of her strengths as an abstract painter and of her contribution to the history of abstraction in American art during this period. Created while living in Rome where she had established a studio, Hafif’s paintings, which she would later refer to as “Pop Minimal” were colorful and certainly on the cutting edge of 60’s abstraction, revealing a set of sensibilities that had not been entirely lost in the work that followed. Prior to her death in April of 2018 there were concurrent exhibitions of her work held at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland museums in Switzerland in 2017.