Barnaby Furnas
dal 25/6/2008 al 26/7/2008
Segnalato da
25/6/2008
Barnaby Furnas
Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
All At Once. This solo exhibition presents new and unseen paintings made during the last two years by the American artist, including works from Furnas' ongoing Rock Concerts, Effigies and Flood series.
Stuart Shave/Modern Art is pleased to present American artist Barnaby Furnas’ second solo exhibition
with the gallery. The show will present new and unseen paintings made during the last two years,
including works from Furnas’ ongoing Rock Concerts, Effigies and Flood series.
Furnas’ uses the physical action of painting to hold the world in freeze-frame, dissecting the visual and
performative landscapes he captures. Using these frozen images to read like film stills of speed Furnas
creates complex spatial abstractions, often on an epic scale.
Working with the several techniques that form his varied painting practice, Furnas alternates through
flooding canvases with paint or burning, scratching or spraying the surface with syringes to show the
movement within his energetic process. Canvasses are doused as they pivot from an adjustable rig,
allowing the paint to run downward and across at varied points; referencing the physicality of Abstract
Expressionism as much as his own earlier beginnings growing up in Philadelphia as a graffiti artist.
These vast horizontal planes are drenched in a corporeal vivid pigment and urethane mixture developed
by Furnas to capture this fast and impulsive application. Often these Flood Paintings have described
bloodied landscapes, overarched by luminous blue skies and more recently the artist has created these
epic vistas in black paint, inverting this reading of the visceral to a more abstract outpouring. While
alluding to the physical intensity of action painting, these canvases betray their seemingly abstract
surface by deliberately describing the scene of biblically scaled apocalypse.
It is in the Rock Concert series that Furnas conjures most of his diverse tricks of paint application.
Painting the spectacle of violence that he sees as bubbling under the surface of these performances,
Furnas shows them halted in an epic and graphic stasis of high crescendo. Within this series Furnas has
previously documented the escalation of energy in concerts by The Melvins, The Velvet Underground,
Mötley Crüe, Joy Division and Slayer, all dramatically lit from above with piercing shards of light cutting
down into the band playing below, the light seizing them midway through their performance. In similar
attention to figurative detail Furnas’ Effigy series are painted onto calf-skin, burned, cut and scrawled
over with shamanistic intent. These works, like the Rock Concerts are built up with much tighter and
more precise detailing while speaking more fluently of the codes of late 19th Century French portraiture,
confining them to their head and shoulders only.
Barnaby Furnas (b. 1973, Philadelphia) lives and works in New York and has had solo exhibitions at the
Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, Dallas, Texas in 2007 and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead, 2005. He was also included in True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the
Present, at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna in 2007. Other group shows have included Dream & Trauma,
Works from the Dakis Joannou collection, Athens, at MUMOK, Vienna in 2007-08; Imagination
Becomes Reality, Museum of Contemporary Art at ZKM, Karlsruhe in 2007; Between Two Deaths,
Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007; and as part of the 2004
Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Opening june 26, 2008
Stuart Shave/Modern Art
23-25 Eastcastle Street - London
Opening hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm
Admission: Free