Eleanor Harwood Gallery

Jill Sylvia 

Tulipomania

Opening Reception: October 20th, 7-10pm

October 20, 2012 to November 17 1, 2012

Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to announce Jill Sylvia's solo show Tulipomania. This marks Jill's third show with the gallery. This show focuses on the tulip mania a period in 17th century Holland during which the contract prices, and demand, for tulip bulbs reached astronomical highs – with single bulbs fetching prices equivalent to those of luxury homes.  The flower was such a prized commodity that a futures market developed for the bulbs, and when frenzy and speculation was at its height (1636-7), the market suddenly crashed. It is considered to be one of the first recorded economic bubbles, or speculative bubbles.

In Tulipomania Jill Sylvia continues to explore notions of “value” employing ledger sheets as her medium. She takes these pages (traditionally used to record the financial transactions of a business or an individual) and subjects them to a process which itself could be described as maniacal. Sylvia uses a drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to separate the boxes. Grids are then reconstructed, utilizing the excised boxes as units of the picture plane.

This time Sylvia’s balance sheets and “reconstructions” take the form of tulip fields. White pages become the steely, Dutch sky while yellows, creams and whites, some shot through with traces of red-ink handwriting, become the petals with the greens as their stems and leaves.

Jill Sylvia lives and works in San Francisco. She has been featured in numerous museum exhibits and has shown widely in the U.S. and Europe. Her work is included in the de Young Museum, San Francisco, California, Anderson Collection, San Francisco Bay Area, Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Fidelity Corporate Collection, Boston, Massachusetts and many other prestigious private collections. 

For more information please contact Eleanor Harwood at 415-867-7770 or eleanor@eleanorharwood.com