Andrew Guenther
dal 21/11/2008 al 9/1/2009
Segnalato da
21/11/2008
Andrew Guenther
Freight + Volume, New York
Looking For Culture Part III: Back to My Old Ways. Positing the installation of the exhibition in synecndochic relation to his painting practice, Guenther displays his works as objects absorbed and re-presented, much in the way his individual works arise from a consumption and regurgitation of culture at large.
For his first solo exhibition at Freight + Volume, New York-based Andrew
Guenther presents old and new paintings together as a means of mining his
individual artistic culture. Positing the installation of the exhibition in
synecndochic relation to his painting practice, Guenther displays his works
as objects absorbed and re-presented, much in the way his individual works
arise from a consumption and regurgitation of culture at large.
Guenther’s work presents a world of gathered and reshaped articles. He
paints using an array of media and casts a wide web of referents, drawing
from the banal (album covers, psychedelia, horror flicks, plants, flowers,
birds) and art historical touchstones (Milton Avery, Goya, Dokoupil, and
Baselitz come to mind). _Flower_ (2000) is a gentle re-positing of a
familiar motif; untitled works from that same time exhibit a similar
refinement in touch. Other works, such as _Auras of Things II_ (2003), deal
with a more psychedelic experience, but speak of a similar communion with
the world. Meanwhile, paintings such as _Water on the Planet_ (2007), are
atavistic, eerie, and sensitive, harking on Neo-Expressionist and Pre-Cubist
aesthetics, with nods to popular culture.
_Aware Now II_ (2008) combines all these referents. The image of a single,
hands-up, figure, is pared down and ghoulish. The straightforward
composition, closely cropped, brings to mind any number of horror-slasher
movies, while the dark washes of color lend a Goya-esque grotesqueness.
Likewise, the thinness of the paint, its dispersion into the canvas and into
the painted subject, translates as the experience of some sort of aura or
ether. Ultimately Guenther’s interests in art history, the psychedelic, the
spiritual, and the macabre are sandwiched into each piece.
In presenting these objects, Guenther presents these works as a conglomerate
of experiences. Paintings are clustered together or grouped on shelves,
exhibiting the artist’s cyclical consumption/regurgitation of the outside
world into each painting, and of each painting back into his oeuvre. The
artist completes the representation of this cycle by including other
handmade trinkets and objects of significance.
Andrew Guenther was born in Wheaton, Illinois, and lives and works in
Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Mason Gross School for the Arts at
Rutgers University in 2000 and has since exhibited domestically and
internationally, notably with Greener Pastures in Toronto, Mogadishni in
Copenhagen, and Bucket Rider in Chicago. His work has been featured in,
amongst other publications, The New York Times, ArtForum, and The Wall
Street Journal.
Reception: Saturday, November 22
Freight and Volume
542 West 24th Street - New York
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am - 6 pm
Free admission