Rebecca Spivack

Artist/Painter Rebecca Spivack has been having “A Dialogue With Walls” since
moving to New York City in 1988 from Paris where she maintained a studio for 3
years supported by grants from the French government and the Cite Internationale
des Arts.

Upon returning to the US an abiding interest in the mural form led her to begin
working directly on walls. Through extensive experimentation with a new hybrid
plaster material she began incorporating motifs and visual vocabulary long
nurtured in her studio practice favoring natural organic and geometric forms and
patterns. Combined with the newfound capacities of the plaster and employing a
wide range of adaptive tools, she developed a unique non-pictorial approach leading to many mural commissions. This wall work also demanded developing a
heightened understanding and awareness of the challenges posed in each
architectural context especially in the consideration of scale and light.
By exploiting the inherent physical properties of the plaster she expanded the range of textural possibilities both visually accumulating many subtle layers treated by sanding and burnishing of the plaster and waxes) and by building actual relief,
pushing the material boundaries. Mural commissions and other plaster applications
became a primary means of support and eventually entwined with her studio
practice.

Thus a “Dialogue With Walls” refers not only to the walls/murals but also to the
many ways they have fed back into the blossoming of her studio practice. This
synthetic approach to working fits well into her history of collage and construction
making. She finds a natural combustive energy sparked by the mating and layering
of different media which have included: papers, canvas, tar paper, found bits of old
fabrics, roofing insulation and most recently the sorting and unfolding of her
collection of hundreds of pieces of saved sandpapers from plaster works over the
past 30 years. This ”unfolding” is a nascent body of work developing now.
In addition to living and working in France mural commissions have taken Spivack
to Anchorage Alaska, Jerusalem, California, greater New York , Massachusetts and
Rhode Island where she received both a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the Rhode Island
School of Design and where she taught as a visiting artist at Brown University.