paint sculptures by kris scheifele

‘7¾" paint chips³‘ by kris scheifele acrylic paint approx. 7½" x 7¾" x 7¾"

new york city artist kris scheifele has created a series of sculptures formed from acrylic paint. in working with layers of paint-chips or disintegrated acrylic panels, scheifele has developed an arsenal of artistic techniques to create her experimental actualizations. all of the artist’s pieces investigate the physicality of a medium– removing the surface in which the solution is applied, instead, fashioning forms from the paint itself. 

scheifele tells designboom of her paint squares, ‘the technique of building up and cutting away all this layered paint not only embeds the work with a temporal record, but also produces a great deal of debris. in the spirit of ‘using every part of the animal’, the acrylic paint chips are collected in boxes where more time must elapse before they fuse into porous cubes’.

a detailed view of ‘7¾" paint chips³’, 2012

an installation view of paint chip cubes acrylic paint

‘ball wall’, 2012 acrylic paint, citrine quartz, sunflower seed, & tin foil 35.5" x 60" x 5.5"

to make the paint balls, scheifele tells us that she begins with a ‘kernel of acrylic paint‘, then paints each small lacquered piece with the same material in order to develop spheres of various sizes– from the largest nearing the size of a melon or basket ball to the smallest being just a little larger than a sunflower seed. every orb in ‘ball wall’ has been carved following the drying of the paint, resulting in the slow reveal of the inner acrylic layers.  

a detailed view of ‘ball wall’

‘money fade’, 2012 acrylic paint, acetate     approx. 14" x 22" x 1"

the works from ‘fades’ is formed from acrylic sheets (applied to) permanently pulled up from a wooden support panel, then sliced, carved, peeled and nailed to the wall in order to allow gravity to finish the formation of each piece. the scheifele further elaborated upon her sculptural techniques with designboom noting of her late 2011 and 2012 ‘fades’ series, ‘the aestheticised decay, created by cutting out oval chips with a box-cutter, suggests the moth-eaten, rot, or fire damage. in the fades series, the acrylic paint fades from color to color through the built-up layers creating a gradation. referring to film and video editing, the fade is a transitional device starting or ending a scene or cross-fading between scenes. like all things— both ‘good’ and ‘bad’—even transitions end and something new begins. I wanted to meditate on and embrace the certainty of change. through its impermanence and imperfection, my work reflects on cycles in life as well as cycles in art. this work is also meant to poke lightheartedly at the seriousness of painting.‘

‘medical fade’, 2011 acrylic paint, acetate approx. 13" x 17" x 2.5"

‘intense rainbow fade’, 2012 acrylic paint, acetate approx. 14" x 15" x 2.5"

‘acid fade’, 2012 acrylic paint, acetate approx. 21.5" x 12" x 2.5"