www.raulzamudio.com: Orphans of Painting

Monday, September 18, 2017

Orphans of Painting

Orphans of Painting

Curated by Raul Zamudio

Opening September 14, 6:00-8:00pm

September 14-October 14, 2017

Ethan Cohen Fine Arts
251 w 19th St. NY, NY, 10011

(Elan Jurado, Black Spew, HD video with audio, 10 min 1 sec. 2010)

Orphans of Painting is an exhibition of international artists who, on the one hand, may identify first and foremost as painters but expand their practice into other formal registers creating hybridized art forms somewhat disparate from their primary medium. Evincing this is the painter German Tagle whose appropriation of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina is morphed into a wall painting with audio extract from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. This work raises an interesting ontological question: is it a wall painting with auditory element or is it a sound work with visual component?

In contrast are other artists in the exhibition who are not painters per se, but work in a variety of media and their participation includes work that conceptually veer towards painting but from another formal point of departure. Exemplary of this is Kay Rosen’s video titled Blue Monday (2015). Known for her text-based works and installations, Rosen’s contribution underscores language’s imagistic quality or in this case the work’s title alluding to music via synesthesia while underscoring the monochrome’s capacity to evoke emotion; e.g. green with envy, red with anger etc.

The subject matter in the individual works comprising Orphans of Painting may be topical, historical, or personal, but what unifies them is a politics of form, specifically usurping the rhetoric of medium specificity and in the process extending painting into different areas as well as its retrieval by other media including sculpture, photography, video, performance and installation. In doing so, the artworks presented embody well what is poetically referred to in the exhibition’s title; that is to say, they are artistic orphans of sorts with an ostensibly corrupted and mongrel pedigree, but nothing that can be identified as being singularly derived from easel and canvas.

Isaac Aden

Bik van Der Pol

Claudia Baez

Ryan Brown

Armand Boua

Robert Costello

Deshawn Davis

Martin Durazo

Andrea Frank

Jeffrey Hargrave

Elan Jurado

Yayoi Kusama