Josephine Halvorson is an American contemporary painter, sculptor, and print maker based in Massachusetts. She is best known for her on-site paintings, drawing from scenes of the natural world and everyday life. Her work bends material fact and immaterial illusion. Halvorson is a Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.
Early life and education
Josephine Halvorson was born and raised in Brewster, Massachusetts. Her mother and father were artists who worked across mediums. As a child, Halvorson spent time in her parents’ metal and blacksmithing shop. Metal and utilitarian object later reappear in Halvorson’s paintings. While still in high school, Halvorson took life drawing classes, studied with Barnet Rubenstein at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and practiced painting on Cape Cod beaches. Halvorson received a Bachelor of arts from The Cooper Union in 2003 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2007. In 2002, she attended a six-week intensive program at the Yale University School of Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. Following her graduation from Cooper Union, she was granted a Fulbright fellowship in Painting to Vienna.
Career
Artistic practice
Halvorson primarily paints en plein air. Her scenes often depict areas found in her everyday life and natural environment, such as books, doors, windows, post-industrial machines and areas of ground. Through her practice of painting on-site and in one continuous session, her paintings are able to mark the time and place of their own creation. Halvorson’s work investigates how place and environment manifests in a painting. Halvorson views her scenes as "active objects," interacting with the artist and inhabiting their own field of scale, shape, and texture across her canvas. Halvorson’s work is interested in a distinction and relationship between material and medium. Speaking with artist Firelei Baez, Halvorson said "I’ve come to think of my practice as a collaboration between me, my materials, and the world, where the painting becomes a testament to time spent together." Scale--perceptual, psychological, and literal--heavily influences Halvorson's work. Paintings in Halvorson’s 2017 solo exhibition As I Went Walking at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. include hand drawn tape measures and standardized units at the top of canvases. The translation of physical site onto canvas through her paintings often figures as a trompe-l'oeil, as the boundary between the space of the artwork and the space of the viewer becomes blurred. Halvorson's first solo museum show, Slow Burn, was exhibited in 2015 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Curated by Cora Fisher, the exhibition featured over twenty oil paintings by Halvorson, each one painted over the course of a single day. In 2016, Halvorson created three site-specific sculptures for her first outdoor exhibition at Storm King Art Center. Her large, painted wooden rulers function as both art object and perceptual tool, emphasizing the human labor of painting with the massive scale of the surrounding environment. "I was hoping it would align with certain natural features that you could almost measure — the length of the ridge of a mountain or the distance between trees,” Halvorson said of her giant measuring devices, “It is always changing based on your orientation to it.” Halvorson’s painting have appeared at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami beach. She is one of the subject of Art21’s award-winning digital documentary series New York Closer Up. Halvorson is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Peter Freeman, Inc., Paris. Her work has been exhibited worldwide.
