There is a German saying that goes like this: “Sag es durch die Blume.” “Say it through a flower.”
The expression is used to convey the need to deliver difficult news softly, tenderly, with elegance and great care. 

During the days of deep isolation that descended upon this City, I found myself painting in the past tense. And while you do not need me to explain to you the contours of experiencing these times, something beautiful occurred just as it seemed so many hardened structures might as well just collapse and fall away: they didn’t. Just like a still life. I created these paintings when I began to feel my emotional limbs again. 

The flower became not just the foundation of this work, but the vessel to move it outward, my catalyst to surrender, release, and embrace a multitude of methods and techniques to help me speak again.

In these paintings, the expressive discord of mark-making evokes a sense of boiling over, only to miraculously find itself safely cradled within the sane confinement of its subject. The larger scale paintings incorporate diverse, even diverging, paint-vocabularies as I allowed myself to embrace the inherent contradictions and polarities of how we now live. Polarities that need to be able to coexist and which actually bloom when they harmonize.

The smaller works are spontaneously composed as loving nods to normalcy, humble, kind poems, painted with a reverence for everyday pleasures. Some flowers grow and die and we only notice them in their journey when they blossom. These are those flowers.

With so much unearthed, I have clung to these blossoms both big and small, their stoicism in the chaos, their celebrations in the stillness. These are cut flowers that still bloom, brave and uninterrupted, sentinels for my hesitations and guides through my doubts. 

If there is any lesson to glean from the tumult, perhaps it’s a new understanding of the absence of formula, the recognition that the universe will do what it wants with unimaginable strength; and while we are powerless to bend it, we can if we choose to honor its iridescence. 

This daisy was on the brink,
These flowers are for us.

Chrissy Angliker
November 2021

Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to present Crazy says the Daisy, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chrissy Angliker. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Chrissy Angliker’s painting practice focuses on creating a balanced relationship between the controllable and uncontrollable, while visually translating her perception of herself in relation to the world. The artist’s investigation of life’s push and pull between control and chaos is depicted through intentional marks, the transitional tension between these two opposing elements representative of Angliker’s search for a sense of grace. The ridges, crevices and peaks created by Angliker’s brushstrokes place her paintings somewhere between dimensionalities, strikingly painterly and figurative while also definitively sculptural and impressionistic. 

Having trained as a young student under the mentorship of Russian artist Juri Borodatchev, Angliker later broadened her means of expression by pursuing a degree in Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute in New York (2006) and worked as a post-graduate in the design industry before shifting back to painting in 2008. The artist’s hybrid background is visible through her calculated and frank yet painterly and unrestrained representations of her subjects. When painting, Angliker aims to influence the paint rather than manipulate it, allowing herself to react to the nature of her medium. In the artist’s words, “as people, we have intentions, but must anticipate the intervention of outside forces beyond our power.” 

Angliker has exhibited extensively in both Europe and the US and her work has been featured in several international print and online publications, including Forbes.com, The Know Culture, The Last Magazine, Bolero Magazine, and Hyperallergic. In 2016, Neidhard & Schoen AG published an in-depth book, Chrissy Angliker PAINT/ING/S, examining Angliker’s process and resulting paintings with a focus on her work created between 2014 and 2016. Angliker has been awarded the Rowena Reed Kostellow Award (Pratt Institute) and the International Takifuji Art Award (Tokyo), among other international accolades and nominations, and has had site- and project-specific work commissioned by AOL America Online, Burton Snowboards, and Wired Magazine, to name a few. 

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Crazy says the Daisy

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