NYAB Event - "Vanishing Anatomies" Exhibition

"Vanishing Anatomies" Exhibition

chashama Gallery (461 W 126th St.)

This event has ended.

The most simultaneously personal and universal experience is inhabiting a body. Artists Alicia DeBrincat and Johnny Thornton take this theme as a departure point, interweaving highly realistic painting, gestural line drawing, and swaths of abstraction to explore how anatomy communicates a sense of self.

Thornton juxtaposes exquisitely sensitive photo-realistic self-portraiture with turbulent contour lines to communicate how chronic illness is both a psychological and a physical corrosion of self. DeBrincat's lushly painted canvases present a rabble of physically-fragmented characters as they negotiate boundaries with themselves and those around them.

Both artists play with denial and generosity of pictorial information, and how much information can be conveyed or withheld to present a body. Together, they explore the psychological space that these vanishing anatomies create.

Alicia DeBrincat is a New York-based artist and writer whose work has been shown throughout the US and featured in numerous mainstream and alternative publications. She earned her MFA at Parsons the New School for Design and recently received a fellowship to be an Artist-in-Residence from the Wassaic Project. She is Director of the Advisory Board for Fowler Arts Collective, a non-profit gallery and studio space located in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Johnny Thornton is an artist living and working in New York City. Born in Connecticut in 1979, Thornton spent his childhood in Johannesburg, South Africa before moving to Tucson, Arizona at the age of 14. After teaching himself to paint, he went on to study Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, where he received his BFA., Thornton opened a gallery in the heart of downtown Tucson called TAC. (Thornton Arts Collective) Gallery and Studios, where he was the sole curator and took part in many shows. He then moved to New York and earned his MFA at Parsons the New School for Design. His work has been displayed in many galleries throughout the US. Currently Thornton works out of his studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.