The Armory Show

Asya Geisberg Gallery presents a booth of elaborately embroidered works on silk by Katarina Riesing. With a fascination for hands, torsos, bodily fragments, Riesing uses negative space as a conceptual and physical void. Hand painted with dye and bleach on both raw silk and smooth crepe de chine, and embellished with delicate iridescent embroidery, her work is bold and confrontational. Smaller paintings zoom in on close croppings, and larger ones explode with minute silvery striations on top of stark black voids or blood red contrasting silk. These works reveal, conceal, or camouflage, layering flesh with embroidered veils, the thread purposefully befuddling as it delineates in achingly laborious multi-colored patterns. Riesing shows bodies hunched, mirrored, and entwined, with background, figures, and shadow ambiguously enmeshed. She clinically sews individual hairs or scars, unleashing the depictive power and unnerving macroscopic actuality of our bodies. Her practice has evolved, now working with multi-directional gold and silver threads, pushing the relationship between silk and skin ever further, to activating drawing, line, rhythm, and pattern-making as a way to visually rip apart the body, and make it fresh and unknowable again. With influences as disparate as Christina Ramberg, Sarah Lucas, or Ghada Amer, she has reinvigorated our relationship to the body, with equal parts seduction and brutality.