NYAB Event - William N. Copley "X-Rated"

William N. Copley "X-Rated"

Paul Kasmin Gallery

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Paul Kasmin Gallery presents William N. Copley X-RATED, a large-scale recreation of the artist’s 1974 exhibition in the former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle. Highly original, libidinous, and unapologeticly joyful, the paintings were unlike anything being made at that time. This body of work, painted between 1972 and 1974, represents a pivotal leap in the artist’s style and is rich with irreverent yet ambitious compositions, unbridled combinations of highly-keyed colors, and generous doses of off-beat humor.

CPLY (the artist’s self-chosen moniker) here presents single figures, pairs, and the occasional group–their gestures and actions translated from magazines procured in seedy 42nd street emporiums–posing and coupling eagerly amid vivid arrays of abstract patterns and lyrical motifs, romping furniture, and tilting planes of scumbled color. Throughout, CPLY strives to uncover the joy and poetry in this most unlikely of subjects, with the belief that “humor, after all is the reminder that we are mortal.” It is a body of work that stands alone in Copley’s ouvre and resolutely apart from the driving narratives in the contemporary art world of the early 1970s.