Jeanne Silverthorne

For more than three decades, Jeanne Silverthorne has taken the studio as her subject. Her work is meticulous and personal, first fashioning everyday items in clay, then casting them in industrial-grade rubber. These objects reflect reality but colored with phosphorus or changed in scale, they retain their uniqueness.

Thus she makes light bulbs, some broken, that fill and spill from a garbage bin; or wire cables, task chairs and shipping crates. Such banal items become metaphors for the inevitability of age and decay, but tempered with humor, hope and humanity.

Silverthorne came of age as an artist when women sculptors not infrequently used Eva Hesse as inspiration and this was true for Silverthorne as well. But her work aligns more closely with the “handmade readymades” of Robert Gober whose sinks and cribs are rooted in memory.

Nature is ever present in her work: dandelions and weeds grow between rubber floorboards, trompe l’oeil sunflowers and flies become still-lifes, her Memento Mori. Since 2007 Silverthorne has been making a functional rubber crate for each sculpture that, upon reaching its destination and contents unpacked, becomes part of the exhibition. In the end, her work is quiet and poignant, counterpoints to the severity of Male Formalism: Serra, Judd, and Andre. Her subjects are imbued with humility and materiality.

Jeanne Silverthorne (b. 1950, Philadelphia, US) received a BA and an MA from Temple University. For over two decades she showed at the respected McKee Gallery up to David and Renee McKee’s retirement in 2015. Her one-person museum exhibits include PS1, New York, the ICA Philadelphia, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C and Whitney Museum, New York. In 2017, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is included in many major museum collections, including MoMA, New York; MFA Houston, SFMOMA, CA and the Whitney Museum in New York. In October 2017 she exhibited at The Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. Jeanne Silverthorne currently teaches at School of Visual Arts (SVA) New York and is represented by MARC STRAUS.