Eunice Golden & Shirley Pettibone

To make an appointment, please write to hello@duanethomasgallery.com Duane Thomas Gallery is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions: Eunice Golden: Drawings 1968–1973 and Shirley Pettibone: Cloth Objects 1968–1973. Installed as distinct but dialoguing presentations, these exhibitions bring together two artists who, working independently during the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed deeply personal and materially innovative approaches to the body, abstraction, and feminist expression. Eunice Golden: Drawings 1968–1973 focuses on a selection of works produced during a pivotal moment in the artist’s early career. Executed in graphite and other dry media, these drawings, often charcoal on canvas, explore fragmented, eroticized, and often monumentalized representations of the male body. Golden’s works resist both classical figuration and purely abstract form, instead occupying a charged space between the two. Limbs, torsos, and suggestive anatomical forms emerge and dissolve across the surface, destabilizing conventional hierarchies of looking and desire. At a time when depictions of the male nude by women artists were rare, Golden’s drawings assert a reversal of the traditional gaze. The works are at once intimate and confrontational, combining a meticulous attention to surface with an unapologetic engagement with sexuality. Rather than presenting the body as fixed or idealized, Golden renders it unstable—cropped, enlarged, and psychologically loaded—anticipating later developments in feminist art while remaining largely unrecognized within its dominant narratives. Shirley Pettibone: Cloth Objects 1968–1973 presents a focused selection of the artist’s soft sculptural works, developed through her experimentation with stained, cut, and sewn fabric. These “Cloth Objects,” formed from painted muslin and stuffed with batting, occupy a space between painting and sculpture. Neither fully flat nor fully dimensional, they translate painterly gesture into bodily form. As described in Pettibone’s own reflections, these works emerged from a desire to move beyond the limitations of traditional painting, incorporating physical substance while retaining a sense of ambiguity and poetic suggestion. The resulting forms—tubular, knotted, or suspended—evoke bodily associations without resolving into explicit representation. They suggest skin, organs, or organic growths, while also maintaining a formal rigor aligned with the conceptual concerns of the period. Pettibone’s use of sewing and fabric introduces a material language historically coded as feminine, transforming it into a structural and conceptual device. The works engage with contemporaneous movements such as “Eccentric Abstraction” and “Soft Sculpture,” yet remain distinct in their synthesis of intimacy, process, and restraint. Despite their innovation, these works were created within a context in which women artists were often marginalized, their contributions overlooked in favor of their male counterparts. Presented together, these two exhibitions highlight parallel investigations into the body and materiality by women artists working during a period of significant cultural and political transformation. Both Golden and Pettibone challenge dominant artistic conventions of their time—Golden through her radical reconfiguration of the drawn figure, and Pettibone through her redefinition of sculptural form. While their practices differ in medium and approach, both artists articulate a subtle but powerful resistance to the constraints placed on women within the art world of the 1960s and 1970s. These exhibitions invite viewers to reconsider their contributions within a broader historical framework and to recognize the continued relevance of their work today.