Round about the cauldron go          —Macbeth, William Shakespeare—

Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present A Troubling, its second solo exhibition of paintings by Mamie Tinkler. For this exhibition opening on April 7, Tinkler debuts eight paintings in watercolor and gouache. In these new works, Tinkler draws on narratives of magic and witchcraft, conjuring an atmosphere of subtle danger and ecstatic transcendence. The title A Troubling refers to a collective noun for goldfinches, but also a “troubling,” or disrupting, of narratives, structures, or surfaces. 

The objects depicted in Tinkler’s paintings seem poised for action, ripe with possibility, anything but still. While she deploys still life and photorealism as processes, her paintings do not fit neatly into either genre. The artist stages and photographs scenes using found and collected objects, theatrical lighting, mirrors, and painted backdrops. Her process of translating these photographs into paintings borders on alchemical, using elements of chance and the inherent unpredictability of the medium to create saturated images of beauty and mystery. From cloistered interiors to celestial expanses, the paintings construct bridges between the real and the ethereal.  

In the title painting, three finches perch in nests of mushrooms atop sky-blue star globes, surrounded by an ominous red sky. The image is inspired by testimony from the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, where an accused woman was said to keep a yellow bird as her ‘familiar’ (an animal spirit that aids in witchcraft). In creating the scene, Tinkler used mirrors to triple the bird figure, creating a sense of urgent convening. From meticulous, painstaking rendering of the bird’s tiny feathers, to the loose washes of color that break down into granular pigment, the painting encapsulates the leap from realism to mysticism that the exhibition proposes. The sensual experience of the paintings overcomes the primacy of image, letting tactile knowing vie with opticality. Tinkler’s images have always proposed a confusion between illusionistic depth and painterly surface - and her most recent works push toward both extremes.

Mamie Tinkler lives and works in New York, NY. She graduated from Columbia University with BA in 2000 and obtained a MFA from Hunter College in 2005. Tinkler’s work has been exhibited at solo and group exhibitions including Ulterior Gallery, New York, NY (solo 2020, 2021); Tops Gallery, Memphis (2022); The Armory Show, New York, NY (2020); The Suburban, Oak Park, IL (solo, 2015); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY (2014); and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2011). Tinkler’s exhibitions and works have received coverage in the New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America.

Press Release PDF

List of Works

Press

New York Times What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in April: Soho, Mamie Tinkler. April 26, 2023