Dramas of Adjustment is a presentation of artworks by Sophy Naess and Joseph Stella. It is the first show by Naess in the Netherlands and presents completely new works such as a site-specific wall-filling tapestry and several large prints on canvas.

Sophy Naess (*1982) was trained as an oil painter and maintains an active multidisciplinary practice that includes weaving, writing, and various print-based projects. Her works are presented in dialogue with works by Joseph Stella (* 1877 Muro Lucano, IT | † 1946 New York City, USA) an Italian-American painter. The latter’s fine silverpoint drawings of plants and flowers and idiosyncratic paintings on paper share with Naess a vulnerable, fluttering sensibility. In 1897, Stella began painting and studying at the Art Students League, then at the New York School of Art. Until the early 1920s, his painting was influenced by the Futurists in Paris. Later, his art was influenced by realism, surrealism, and abstract painting.

Between panels with stretched colorful paint marks, illustrations of a fox appear who tries, in a variety of attempts and constant stretches, to reach grapes that are hanging high on a tree. The obvious effort of the fox is never rewarded. The wall-sized weaving by Sophy Naess is an approach to Aesop’s fable of “The Fox and the Grapes”, in which the fox tells himself, after not being able to harvest the desired fruit, that the grapes are no good anyway and therefore not worth chasing. Naess’s weaving catches the fox in the moment of constant trial, continuously under tension and never reaching his satisfaction.

What resonates in the work is the feeling of tension that can occur when one strives for the idea of a “good” or “better” life. Lauren Berlant, the renowned American cultural theorist, sees this attachment as an actual obstacle to ones being. “Dramas of Adjustment” is the term Berlant uses to describe the situation when an unfeasible aim, which one might project in an object or idea of desire, will never be reached and therefore one needs to adjust their perception of it. (Berlant, Lauren: Cruel Optimism, London 2011.) In Naess’ tapestry, the grapes can be seen as the idea of the better life which the fox tries to reach to no end.

Besides their figurative meaning, the works presented in the exhibition Dramas of Adjustment are quite literally dependent on tension and stretching. Weaving the tapestry, for example, requires the pull and the traction of a loom in order to create it. The weaving is a rather artisanal approach and reflects Naess’s interest in structure and material itself. In her tapestry, the adaptability of the material as well as the stretching of the painted marks applied on the threads before the weaving process, transmit the idea of simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction.

Besides her examination of narratives such as myths and fables, Sophy Naess depicts in her paintings details she observes in everyday life, often looking to plant forms and their negative space as a mirror of the tensions in the woven work.

Joseph Stella (1877 – 1946) was one of the most technically-skilled and versatile painters of the early twentieth century, and eclectic in his styles and motifs. He painted and drew everything from grim industrial sites to phantasmagoric landscapes, in meticulous realist, cubist, futurist and precisionist styles.

Stella established his reputation as a bold and innovative artist who was able to convey the excitement of the city and modern life. At the same time, he was compelled to express the powerful spiritual connection he felt with the natural world through his many paintings of flora and fauna. This was a subject the artist would pursue persistently through his entire career, becoming a prolific creator of lyrical and exuberant depictions of flowers, plants and birds. Stella saw a purity and beautiful mystery in nature and explored it with passion, combining realism and fantasy in a modernist idiom.