NYAB Event - John Hardy "Shoppers"

John Hardy "Shoppers"

Schroeder Romero & Shredder

This event has ended.

Shredder presents John Hardy: Shoppers, featuring over a dozen new paintings and works on paper focused on his New York City. A long time resident and student of 'the city'-Hardy has lived and worked in Soho for over thirty years and knew the city well for decades before-his paintings focus on the almost organic fabric of its architecture, residents, visitors, and namely advertising so increasingly ubiquitous on every available plane. Through Hardy's eye the city is a fascinating but often lonely and alienating system. It is one defined by its shifting buildings and mammoth billboards where underwear models, enticing alcohols, even witty texts for self storage become part and parcel to the city's architecture, a growing blight grafted to its very structure. As shimmering glass towers rise above the plastered tenements below the city is both alive and quiet at once. Using a subtle touch and brilliant play of light from building to street, these are not empty cityscapes though but often filled with people, far smaller and anonymous than their near-nude billboard counterparts. Frozen in Hardy's brush stroke they bustle about and stand close but are disconnected, focused less on each other and their surroundings but on their cell phones and shopping.

This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including: the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum, Atlanta; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; the New York Historical Society; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC. He has also been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and from the National Endowment for the Arts.