NYAB Event - David Rathman "Let’s See What Stirs"

David Rathman "Let’s See What Stirs"

Larissa Goldston Gallery

This event has ended.

Larissa Goldston Gallery presents David Rathman’s fifth solo exhibition in New York. Let’s See What Stirs includes eight watercolors and a 9 -minute film.

For this exhibition, Rathman eschews traditionally recognizable art-historical influences and turns to contemporary culture for source material, appropriating images of events replete with intensity. His large-scale works on paper embrace and portray the excitement, danger and vulnerability of the human experience. Drawing from his lexicon of quintessentially masculine imagery (sports, Westerns and cars, to name a few) Rathman challenges the traditional ideas of the implacability of the masculine ideal. Theses works evoke competitiveness—keeping score, a theme that permeates the majority of Rathman’s work.

In Rathman’s last exhibition at the gallery he created a series of cinematic watercolors that paid homage to the Old West and Spaghetti Westerns produced in the 1960s and 1970s. By nature of their story board format, he forced the viewer to experience the works in the same way that traditional films are viewed—constructing a narrative frame by frame. In Strange Arithmetic, Rathman returns to the original format of film incorporating these drawings, and other recent work to create a short movie that embraces the archetypal nature of Western cinema, while this time, escaping the necessity for linear story-telling. The film is simultaneously ethereal and primal reflecting his affinity for moral absolutism. Throughout the film, themes and narratives are effaced and obscured by atmospheric effects evoking whiteout conditions. The result is a work that is fleeting and ephemeral. The packaging for the film, a small, coffin-like box with the titled burned into the lid, will also be on view.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing
• Film

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