What Pipeline presents the work of Cay Bahnmiller in her first posthumous solo exhibition, on view through July 24.
This show consists of works spanning 26 years, from 1980 to 2006, and serves as a reintroduction to Bahnmiller’s work. It’s a selective survey representing overlapping bodies of work in an attempt to capture her nature, including late work that has never been exhibited.
She was a polymath with a fervent appetite for languages, architecture, philosophy, poetry, literature and art. Her work infused these subjects with an intense lived experience that was at times emotionally fraught. Besides painting, Bahnmiller’s life revolved around reading and writing, in which this exhibition documents her interest in volumes of notebooks, slides, drawings, Xeroxes, paintings and sculptures.
Bahnmiller said she “exhausted the possibilities of the city,” and thereafter began turning inward, opening her work to interiority, memory and dreams. The resulting works are “wholly subjective expressions of an interiorized space.” This thematic exploration continued to inform numerous series of work throughout the rest of her life.
