As featured in back-to-back debuts this fall at New York’s 2025 Armory Show and the artist’s first solo exhibition at SECRIST | BEACH in Chicago, Jacqueline Surdell offers an intimate perspective on this pivotal moment in her practice and career.
Surdell’s artistic approach is deeply informed by her familial and cultural history. Growing up, she witnessed two seemingly opposing worlds—her Polish grandfather’s grueling labor in Chicago’s steel mills and her Dutch grandmother’s peaceful plein air landscape painting. These formative experiences shaped her understanding of work, craft, and the body’s role in creation. Utilizing industrial rope, she weaves large-scale sculptural pieces on self-constructed looms, engaging her entire body in a process that explores the intersection of work, body, and labor in image-making.
At the intersection of textile, painting, and sculpture, Surdell challenges traditional artistic categories. Her woven reliefs—composed of twisted, bound, and tightly or loosely wefted ropes—pay homage to painterly traditions of depth and perspective while simultaneously exposing the illusionistic nature of the picture plane. Moving fluidly between these disciplines, she establishes her practice as one of transformation.
Her work extends beyond material experimentation to interrogate broader themes of power, labor, and doctrine. Raised in the Catholic Church, Surdell revisits religious iconography, using her physically intensive practice as a form of rumination and discovery. Through this lens, she considers the nature of ritual, myth, the sacred, the monumental, and the sublime, questioning where she, and by extension, the body are situated within these structures.
A film by Dayson Roa of T.P.Y.K
Presented by SECRIST | BEACH
November 13, 2025
