paintingpainting - solo exhibition, at Ameringer McEnery Yohe (New York, NY, 2017)
"For the past ten years I have engaged with many elements of the artist's studio - painting, drawing, materials, color systems, process trials, process notes, logistics, accounting, order, chaos, books, and art history's visual records - and have made the studio in the round the subject of my paintings. I have typically presented the paintings in the context of installations of the exposed studio, nakedly incorporating various provisional studio processes and presenting a self-reflexive position that merges life and studio life. With paintingpainting, my second solo exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, in order to see my paintings qua paintings, I have extracted the work from the contextual world of the studio in which it was made, upending the form in which I have presented past paintings. Like my installations, these paintings are full of an overwhelming mass of visual information, swallowed from my studio. The tightly packed compositions simultaneously employ linear, grid, and concentric structures to amplify the complexity and to oscillate and destabilize the viewing position. The paintings frequently employ painted details of other paintings, from the modernist canon (Matisse, Cezanne, Picabia, Picasso, and Braque, among others) to less canonical and contemporary figures (including Alma Thomas, Dana Schutz, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Mimi Gross, and my own past paintings). The compression of painting's history within each work and my use of non-stable compositional structures mirror my own firmly unstable position. I paint with an irrational and constantly expanding love of painting while simultaneously accepting the impossibility of resolutely holding a position unchanged. - Franklin Evans He is a current recipient of the 2017-18 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Link to Ameringer McEnery Yohe paintingpainting, 2017 PRESS RELEASE
PRESS COVERAGE Link to Arte Fuse Review, Thavma Phillips Link to Sound and Vision: Franklin Evans Podcast Conversation with Brian Alfred |