MARIA TEICHER

POSTPARTUM PROSE

solo exhibition

June 2nd - July 2nd, 2023

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Being a mother is living through a never ending cycle of gorgeous mourning. There is death constantly: every day, week, month, and year. There’s death of stages, developments…of first words, and sweet habits…of year one and then two, now six, until your heart is breaking for one more sleepless night of loving on tiny toes and guiding little wisps of hair off chubby cheeks.           

- Maria Teicher

 

Arch Enemy Arts presents POSTPARTUM PROSE, eighteen new oil paintings and mixed media works by Philadelphia-area artist Maria Teicher. Teicher has shown with our gallery since the very beginning, but for the past seven years, her exquisite works have been rarities. And for good reason:

 

“In 2016, less than a year after my last solo exhibition at Arch Enemy, I became pregnant with my first son. Shortly after his birth, I developed postpartum anxiety and some postpartum depression. Extreme sleep deprivation, feeding issues, bodily shortcomings, navigating this country’s awful maternity leave and care, attempting to heal myself and my post-birth body, and not knowing who I was or who I was becoming made the world go gray very quickly.”

 

POSTPARTUM PROSE is Teicher’s poetic response to her experience of becoming a mother, work that gives voice to the silent suffering so many new moms face. It is a substantive series–six years in the making–that signals the resounding return of a contemporary master and her decided departure from previous work. Teicher takes us on a completely different representational journey than anything she’s shown before. Here, she imbues botanical still lifes with conceptual symbolism, invoking deeply visceral meanings by way of the very technical mastery she employs. 

 

In these paintings, quiet slate backgrounds scream in their silence, glazed with subtle differences in coloration, wash-like textures, and tonal effects. Teicher paints reflections of light on glass, on crisp spills and droplets of water with such precision that her vessels glare in contrast to what they contain, highlighting the isolation and difference she communicates. And yet, in complete and perfect contradiction–which could perhaps be the definition of motherhood–her painting of melancholy is wrenchingly beautiful. The work is devastating and sublime. Teicher writes: 

 

Motherhood, for me, is being in a consistent stage of mourning that which has already bloomed and shown me so much, but knowing it’s a short matter of time before I see what’s next…and if I prune, water, take care of, and supply the proper nutrients, what I’ll see regrown from the current death will be even more incredible than I could’ve conjured.

 

Maria Teicher lives and works in Pennsylvania. She completed her undergraduate studies at Rowan University and obtained an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She currently teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and runs her own photography studio, Iris and Echo. This is Teicher’s third solo feature with Arch Enemy Arts, following her last exhibition in 2015. 

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- Candice Musher

 

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POSTPARTUM PROSE will be on view from June 2nd - July 2nd, 2023.
Sold works will begin to ship the week of July 9th unless other arrangements have been made.

Items marked with a red dot have already been sold.

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