Petah COYNE

Petah COYNE (b. 1953, Oklahoma City) is a New York-based contemporary sculptor and photographer. Referred to by Artforum as the “queen of mixed-media,” Coyne works in disparate and innovative materials, such as the artist's own specially-formulated wax, horsehair, black sand from pig iron casting, hay, mud, pearls, scrap metal, silk flowers, glass, velvet, life-sized trees, found objects, and cast-wax statuary figures. In the mid-1990s, Coyne began incorporating taxidermy into her practice, developing relationships with trusted taxidermists and licensed sources. Birds, waterfowl and small animals can be seen throughout her works, some clearly visible, others deeply imbedded within the sculptures.
Coyne derives her inspiration from equally diverse sources of literature and film, from Japanese authors, Dante's Divine Comedy and Greek and Roman mythology, to world culture, the natural environment and the artist's own personal biography. Best known for her large and small scale hanging sculptures and floor installations, Coyne's practice of repurposing materials continually fuels her work, breathing new life into each object. Themes of loss, darkness and hidden beauty are recurring in her work, what Director Joseph C. Thompson stated in 2010 on the occasion of her solo show Everything That Rises Must Converge, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, as “a world of dense, enfolding forces, a world in which rising from the surface takes one inwards to some dark, ultimate center.”
Her work is in numerous permanent museum collections, including MoMA (NY); Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn); Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia); SFMOMA (San Francisco); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City); Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati) and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Finland), among others. She is represented by Galerie Lelong (NY) and Nunu Fine Art (Taipei).
Select awards include John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award; Rockefeller Foundation Award; three National Endowment for the Arts Awards; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award; Asian Cultural Center Award; New York Foundation for the Arts Award; Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Foundation Award; Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities Awards and the Art Matters Award.
Untitled #1415 (Flatland) is Coyne's contribution to RE-ACTION. A hanging wall installation, it consists of three lace screens with vintage doilies the artist sourced in Venice. Suspended on rods from the wall, the translucent screens hang parallel and are subjected to the circumambient movement of air. Coyne appropriates the previous work by Riika Kuoppala into a new video that continuously projects overtop and through the screens, fragmenting the image on the opposing wall, though still recognizable. This regenerated video merges historic imagery from the artist's alma mater, of the first figure drawing classes for women in America, with Kuoppala's work and various photographs utilized throughout RE-ACTION. Referencing the 1884 satirical novella by Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Coyne's installation illustrates a juxtaposition of planes. The projected light and the rush of the surrounding air, transform the flat screens into a multi-layered and three-dimensional space, a dynamic world where light, sound and emotions are experienced together.
Petah Coyne lives and works in NY (USA).