NYAB Event - Keith Mayerson "My Modern Life"

Keith Mayerson "My Modern Life"

Derek Eller Gallery

This event has ended.

My Modern Life is both an intimate account of an artist's journey into the 21st century and a contemporary portrait of America in challenging times. For this exhibition, Mayerson works primarily from photos he has taken or directed. Inspired by old masters and modernists who made paintings which were both political and personal, Mayerson's compositions are painterly, warm and transcendent. With a self-portrait as a yearning young man in 1983, to an image of he and his life partner celebrating their marriage in 2008 when it was legal in California, to a picture of their cabin home where the ceremony took place, Mayerson paints from his heart romantic images that hold deep significance not only to him, but extend to art, religion, culture, and pertinent issues that are shaping the world right now. Among these images is a painting of the Tibetan leader the Karmapa on his first trip to NYC in front of a thangka painting of his "previous incarnation." In another, the actor portraying Rothko contemplates his painting from the recent play Red, as the audience reads their playbills. A painting of an American flag beating in the night sky complements an image of a luminous Empire State Building, along with a painting of the New York street corner 39th and 10th, lit up like a transcendent vision of America. In these works, Mayerson attests to the power of art and seeks to rewrite such post-modern artists as Johns and Warhol, but also renders the city that New Yorkers know in 2010. For the exhibition's closing image, Mayerson paints from satellite views pastiched together from Google Earth. It is a United States of the moment: diversely and ideologically the country that is beloved yet hard to define, one who's social and political landscape is in a state of constant flux and change.

Keith Mayerson has professionally exhibited his art in galleries and museums since 1993. His exhibitions are often installations of images that create larger narratives. Each work is imbued with allegorical content that relates to the world, yet allows through its formal nuances for the transcendent and sublime. The works stand on their own for form and content, but like a prose poem of images on walls, experiencing in context the images as a series, the viewer creates the ultimate meaning for the installations.