Guano (Menhir)
Judit Reigl French, born Hungary
Not on view
Part of an ambitious series of process- and time-based paintings, Reigl’s Guano (Menhir) confronts the viewer with an imposing and ambiguous mound centrally positioned against a dark backdrop. The form’s hard, stony appearance, evoking compressed natural strata, is a result of the painter’s innovative technique, a radical departure from her earlier, Surrealist-inspired methods. To protect a new studio floor, she had covered it with several layers of rejected canvases, which became saturated with pictorial matter and were trampled underfoot. In her words, "As time went by, these excremental rags slowly became stratified layers, like the guano [bird dung] that comes from the isles of Latin America." She then performed an excavation of sorts, finding her composition by using a homemade tool to scrape through the years of serendipitous accumulation.
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