Cadence Giersbach (b. 1966, New York, NY) makes work that begins in the ground and ends somewhere near the stars. Working across sculpture and painting, she builds forms that hold the natural world in suspension — geological, atmospheric, alive. Her sculptures are coated in modeling compound, their surfaces colored with pigments that pool and thin across the topography of each piece. Her paintings are sewn: segments of raw canvas brushed with paint, stitched together into compositions that carry the logic of quilts and the ambition of abstraction. The handmade is never incidental. Shapes are askew. Paint drips. The work insists on the body that made it. Her kite-shaped paintings are among the most distinctive things being made in American art today. They hover between object and image, between craft and fine art, between the geometry of the grid and the intimacy of memory — aligning her with generations of artists and needleworkers in her family, and with the broader histories of the Pattern and Decoration movement and the shaped canvas. They do not resolve neatly into any one category. That is precisely the point. Giersbach earned a BA with honors from Vassar College, an MFA from Rutgers University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has presented solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Roebling Hall, and Satchel Projects in New York, and has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. Her work is held in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Harvard University, and the RISD Museum, and has been commissioned by Arts for Transit, MTA and Percent for Art, NYC. She has received fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and is a MacDowell Fellow. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Artforum. Giersbach lives and works in New York City and Cochecton, NY.