Existing between the physical and the abstract, Erica Mahinay’s works engage painting’s physicality as surface and tactile matter, entering into dialogue with its existence as body, memory and imagination. A similar sensibility informs her biomorphic sculptures of disjointed bodies rendered as unfinished forms. Building on the momentum generated by her inclusion in the most recent iteration of “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum, Mahinay is presenting with Make Room at Frieze Los Angeles with pieces that are the culmination of a decade-long process of rigorous studio experimentation. Working across multiple materials, her practice probes embodiment, perception and material consciousness.
Moving fluidly at the intersection of gestural abstraction and phenomenological inquiry, and deliberately inhabiting the threshold between abstraction and figuration, her work is, in both process and presence, a sustained meditation on embodiment and material consciousness. It touches something at the core of our encounter with the world, resonating across cognitive, emotional and imaginative dimensions. When Observer caught up with Mahinay ahead of Frieze, she explained that during her early explorations, as she searched for a conceptual foundation for her work, she was deeply drawn to memento mori and still-life painting. These references shaped her earliest output, which included still lifes but quickly expanded beyond conventional pictorial boundaries into hybrid objects recalling Rauschenberg’s combines, in which painted elements pushed outward into space and assumed sculptural form.
That became the foundation of her sustained interest in the tension between painting as a physical object and painting as an illusory window—an essential dialectic at the core of abstraction that animates her entire practice. “That’s a conversation I think abstraction takes on—the physicality of painting, and either the embracing or negation of painting as this space to enter,” she reflected. Over time, these questions became less literal and more materially embedded, as she no longer felt compelled to represent them directly. Her subsequent experimentation with fabric marked a decisive shift, allowing her to collapse the expanded sculptural field of the combine works back into a surface that was technically two-dimensional yet still retained a palpable tactile depth. Working primarily with sewn silk for nearly a decade, she explored varying degrees of transparency while deliberately exposing stretcher bars and structural supports, using these elements to probe painting’s underlying architecture and to question, more fundamentally, what constitutes painting itself.