Inga Gallery presents Ali Silverstein’s large-scale sculptural constructions of cut, hung, painted, and layered canvas at UNTITLED during Art Basel Miami Beach week 2015. Silverstein’s work builds on a rare painterly skill while embracing the authenticity of immediate, unqualified creative mark-making. “I want my mind to get out of the way, so that the work can be made by other intelligences,” says Silverstein. “I want the works to surprise me. That’s the joy in it.”

Using a continuous process of action and response, massive sheets of canvas are painted, manipulated, dragged, pinned, painted again, cut up, hoisted up ladders, crawled over, rearranged, glued, and painted again. The genesis of the work is not conceptual; Silverstein makes a conscious effort not to “understand” what she is doing in advance. From the stacked puddles of translucent color that transformed into portraits in earlier works to the hung fringes and collaged canvas shapes in more recent pieces, layering has remained central to her visual language.

Hints of landscape, layers of skin, and shapes of color collide in a continual play of concealment and revelation. These works evoke not merely landscape, but inner-scape or culture-scape — where the inner meets the outer. Raw, physical, and immediate, yet also delicate, elegant, and lyrical, Silverstein’s paintings unfold through the presentness of their making. Calling to mind Abstract Expressionism and action painting, as well as the cut-out sensibility of Matisse and the poetic intimacy of Richard Tuttle, the works embody an ever-expanding freedom and the tension of pushing through layers of resistance.