In her paintings, Francesca Fuchs resists and reconsiders the cultural signals of importance, particularly as they elide and erase the intimacies of everyday life. Her repainting of prints, photographs, and paintings that hang on her walls reenacts their original making while also building something new. There is, she suggests, an archetypal sameness in this act of remaking, and yet these unremarkable source paintings find an utter uniqueness in the artist’s decision to dedicate careful focus to them. Even as the re-paintings bear a relationship to their referent, they are new and specific, blurring the conceptual edges of the original. In other paintings, Fuchs takes her subjects from the household objects she touches every day, offering them the focused looking-over-time that signals both love and care. Across her career, Fuchs’ critique of “importance” has unfolded in rethinking the dismissal of the small, the intimate, the feminine, and the beloved, insisting instead that these objects illuminate fundamental truths about our selves, our communities, and our histories. This attentiveness makes a significant and expansive critique of the modes with which we codify national, cultural, and aesthetic taste into seemingly unshakeable mythologies, identities, and histories.
Francesca Fuchs received her BFA (1993) from the Wimbledon School of Art, London, and her MFA (Meisterschülerin) (1993) from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. Born in London and raised in Münster, Germany, Francesca Fuchs moved to the U.S. in 1996 for the Core Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Fuchs' work has been shown in venues including The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1996); The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2000); and The Suburban, Illinois (2013). She was the 2017 Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, and Art League Houston's 2018 Texas Artist of the Year. Solo exhibitions include Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2018); Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, TX (2015, 2012); Texas Gallery, Houston, TX (2013, 2010, 2005); and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2007). Francesca Fuchs lives and works in Houston, TX.