JANET PASSEHL | AL’S OFFICE
May 18 - June 20, 2025
These works are small poems characterized by white space, tension and texture. Nothing is extraneous. They tell their own story.
Janet Passehl has been working primarily with plain cotton cloth since 1990, staining, folding, ironing, cutting, and draping. In 2022, she learned to weave and now makes her own material on a floor loom. For more than thirty years, Passehl has worked as Curator and Collections Manager for Sol LeWitt and his collection of work by other artists. In this capacity she was deeply affected by sustained exposure not only to LeWitt’s art and processes, but also those of Kazuko Miyamoto, Eva Hesse, Fred Sandback, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Daniel Buren, as well as artists of the Italian Arte Povera movement. She traveled widely in Europe and sought out the work of old masters, in particular Italian and Northern Renaissance, and Dutch and French landscape. At the same time, Passehl continued to develop her own unique aesthetic vocabulary, eventually arriving at a position of great restraint.
Passehl’s art has been shown New York City, New England, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Australia, China and Korea. She is represented in several private and museum collections.
Passehl is also a writer, with one published full-length poetry collection. Her poems and essays have been published in journals and artist’s catalogues, and have also been featured in art exhibitions in the form of hand-made books or audio installations.
PROJECT SPACE
JANET PASSEHL | Rapt
May 4 - June 8, 2018
In the Project Space, Janet Passehl will present “Rapt”, featuring three ironed cloth works from 2010 and three pencil drawings from 2007. For Passehl, drawing is a sculptural act, wherein mark-making embodies a three dimensional movement through space, be it the surface of paper or across a pressed piece of cloth. Using an iron as a drawing implement on fabric, Passehl discovered a means of making an invisible, or “silent” mark, a form of drawing that leaves behind no actual mark but rather the history of an action having taken place. These cloth works embody a rich tactility and sense of the familiar, invoking an immediate and empathetic response in the viewer. Likewise a very human element is contained in Passehl’s drawings on paper, where one’s intuitive need for order and consistency is met with the inevitability of chaos and imperfection.
Janet Passehl’s work has been featured in numerous group & two-person exhibitions including: Galerie Gisela Clement (Bonn, Germany), Ian Potter Museum of Art (University of Melbourne, Australia), Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), The Drawing Center (New York), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Thomas Rehbein Gallery (Cologne, Germany) and the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY). Her work is held in several prominent collections such as the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Colorado Springs Fine Art Center Museum; and The LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT. Passehl’s poetry has appeared in Court Green, Arsenic Lobster, Caliban Online, and in a 2015 full-length collection titled Clutching Lambs, published by Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL.