Fergus McCaffrey is pleased to announce a solo booth of works by Marcia Hafif at Frieze New York 2015.
Born in Pomona, California in 1929, over the course of her extensive career Marcia Hafif has developed a personal practice of exploring and experimenting with the process and materials of painting. After graduating with a B.A. from Pomona College, she moved to Rome, where she lived and worked for eight years before returning to California in 1969 to persue her M.F.A. at the University of California at Irvine.
In 1971, Hafif moved to New York City, where, in the face of widespread critiques of the relevance of painting, she developed a conceptual framework concentrated on the materials of the painting itself. Hafif began to employ a successive set of empirical tasks, each allowing her to investigate some aspect of color, paint, or support. For over four decades and through 27 evolving series, she has used the form of painting to experiment with varying types of materials and supports. Fergus McCaffrey will present four major series from different points in Hafif’s career, including Mass Tone Paintings (1973-74), a selection of which were first shown at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1974; Broken Color Paintings (1978), featured in Breaking Color, curated by Alanna Heiss at The Clocktower in New York in 1979; Fresco Paintings (2008), based on the colors of Piero della Francesca; and, Splash Paintings (2009), inspired by the work of Fra Angelico.
Hafif’s work has been exhibited extensively both in the United States and in Europe,
most recently in the 2014 Hammer Museum Biennial, Made in LA. A forthcoming
exhibition at Laguna Art Museum will open in June 2015. Her full body of work
comprises photography, sculpture, film, and installations, in addition to painting, and is
represented in many collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Marcia
Hafif divides her time between Laguna Beach and New York.