Maggie Avolio

Region: MFA Annual

I am a New York–based artist working in multiple media. My work conceptually deconstructs and subverts the conventions of historically male-centric art. As a female artist, I integrate my perspective and experience through a mixture of domestic craft and art-historical references. By reimagining traditional painting constructs, I challenge notions of technique, perspective, space, dimensionality, and abstraction.

Through manipulations of material and space, I create minimalistic artwork that exists simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and installation. Raw canvas is unwoven, torn, folded, or reconstructed to create three-dimensional form. I create marks using unconventional methods like stitching. Paint is absent from the canvas yet sometimes appears in the surrounding area, creating a new spatial identity.

Through the transformation of the material and concept, new forms emerge as a paradoxical opposite or otherness. The twodimensional becomes three-dimensional. The soft becomes hard. The part becomes the whole. The forgotten becomes present.