Pictured: What We See by Libby Hawk. Image courtesy of the artist.

A special exhibition of 3D paintings opens tomorrow at Art Advocates Gallery in Siesta Key Mall, highlighting the latest from sculptor Libby Hawk. Titled Revising Assumptions/Libby Hawk Paintings Challenging Visual Norms, the work sees the artist pivoting to paper and paintbrush for an exploration of dimensionality and one fundamental question: What makes a painting a painting? The exhibition opens tomorrow at 2pm, with a presentation from the artist at 3pm.

“The show is really the evolution of that inquiry into what is a painting,” says Hawk. “And as I’m revising my own assumptions about what painting is, I hope this is mirrored in the audience’s experience.” As such, the exploration manifests in multiple ways throughout the 28 works comprising Revising Assumptions, with the artist experimenting with both material and technique, before finally taking a metaphorical-but-almost-literal machete to the form.

Early forays into this frontier see Hawk bringing dimensionality directly to the canvas itself, spreading it out on the floor and molding and folding it into something topographical, full of ridges and valleys, before preserving its form with a potent mix of clear medium, fabric glue and milliners’ chemical stiffener. Then she can begin to paint, working with the form of the canvas, not just on top of it. Later forays see the artist throwing the process somewhat in reverse, creating abstract paintings on opposing sides of watercolor paper, tearing the whole thing into strips, and then mounding them on the canvas as though sculpting. Still, she felt the exploration had not reached its full potential.

“It was starting to answer part of my question,” she says. “But I wasn’t ready yet, in my brain, to free the painting from the frame.”

And so the final foray finds Hawk crossing that last boundary, combining elements of earlier explorations to create a series of free-standing sculptural paintings entirely liberated from their frames. Instead, the paintings—carved into strips and stiffened—hang from stands handcrafted from bamboo or assorted lamp parts. The result is a work of art with no frame, able to be viewed from all angles, and a lingering question in search of an answer.

“It was fun,” Hawk says. “You’ll have to tell me if it was successful.”

Opening tomorrow at Art Advocates Gallery, Revising Assumptions is available for viewing every Saturday 2-4pm. Artist presentations are 3pm on March 1 & 15.

Pictured: What We See by Libby Hawk. Image courtesy of the artist.