NYAB Event - Red Grooms "Torn from the Pages"

Red Grooms "Torn from the Pages"

Marlborough (Midtown)

This event has ended.

Since Ruckus Manhattan, his first widely acclaimed exhibition at Marlborough in 1976, Grooms has staked his claim as one of America’s most original, inventive, and popular artists. In this exhibition he turns his creativity towards other established artists, making them his subjects. The exhibition comprises 24 small mixed media constructions that examine influential artists from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Gerhard Richter, Leonora Carrington, Edward Hopper, Natalia Goncharova, Edouard Vuillard, Erich Heckel, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, John Marin, Richard Prince, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Dorothea Tanning, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cezanne, Eugène Atget, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, and Yves Tanguy.

In a new take on the artist’s hallmark dimensional constructions which compound painting and sculpture, Grooms incorporates an element of collage into the works in this exhibition. Integrating pages from magazines with watercolor, acrylic, ink, and other media he creates perceptive portraits of well-known artists and places them within the environment of their own works. For example, in the wryly humorous Fifteen Minutes, Mr. Warhol, 2012, Warhol stands directly in front of three of his prominent screen prints with his camera in hand, seemingly unaware of the viewer. In Something Fishy (Magritte), 2011, Grooms fuses the bust of Magritte, who wears his ubiquitous bowler hat, with the torso and legs of one of Magritte’s female nudes, a tongue- in-cheek allusion to Magritte’s famous 1934 painting of a fish with human legs. In another astutely imagined work, Joan’s Blues (Joan Mitchell), 2012, Grooms presents the viewer with a three quarter view of the artist with her expressive, emotional style filling out the background. Mitchell’s gaze directly confronts the viewer while her torso dissolves into Abstract Expressionist brush strokes.