NYAB Event - “Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York” Exhibition

“Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York” Exhibition

Garis & Hahn

This event has ended.

Garis & Hahn presents “Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York”, an exhibition of work by New York-based painters Tatiana Berg, Ariel Dill, Sarah Faux, Clare Grill and Kristina Lee, curated by Kyle Chayka. The artists selected for this exhibition adopt a similar approach to abstract painting coined “New Casualism” in a 2011 essay written by Sharon Butler. This will be the first large gallery show in New York that brings together a group of artists specifically engaging with this new mode of abstraction.

The title, Dying on Stage, is a reference made by artist Tatiana Berg, who compares her painting practice to the performative vulnerability of stand up comedy. In a 2013 interview with Esquire magazine, comedian and actor Bill Murray said of being on stage, “You’ve got to be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots.” In this context, the act of painting is an embrace of the continual loop of trying, failing and ultimately succeeding to hit the right note for the waiting audience.

Former Hyperallergic.com senior editor and curator of Dying on Stage, Kyle Chayka, introduces the artistic impulses and approach to the New Casualism painting style in his curatorial statement: There’s a new kind of painting bubbling up out of New York City. This new wave of painters are content to wander freely between abstraction and figuration, pure aesthetics and the real world, discipline and play.
These are the New Casualists: young artists who pull their aesthetic influences as much from reality TV shows, online social networks, and pop songs as they do art history. Their visual vocabulary is nondiscriminatory — taking stock of the endless, sprawling deluge of imagery presented by the Internet, today’s painters churn up their disparate references and influences into a fresh visual argot.

While New Casualism is an aesthetic embrace of “the offhand” and “the unintentional,” this is not an ideological dismissal of the formal aspect of painting or its history. The painters in this show are all forthcoming or recent MFA graduates who acknowledge and embrace antecedents like Philip Guston, Dana Schultz and Amy Sillman. They are united by an interest in reprocessing an image-saturated 21st
century reality through a personal filter and then producing a compelling visual idea in paint. Rather than pursuing some truth or dogma about the nature of painting, inspiration is the key element and is drawn from anything and everything—the pattern in a bikini on Mad Men (Tatiana Berg’s “Megan Draper”), or 18th century needlepoint samplers (Clare Grill’s “Fits”). All generative subjects are equally
worthy. Viewers might identify references to Asian calligraphy, Impressionist colors, commercial sign painting or simply a round, Kardashianesque curve. The measure of success in these paintings is calculated expressly in their ability to elicit a feeling, provoke a second glance, create a meaningful moment before the roving eyes move on.

Tatiana Berg studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2009 with a BFA in Painting. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has shown at spaces including Freight+Volume, Regina Rex, and Storefront gallery, and was featured in the 2012 Queens Museum biennial. Berg will graduate from the Columbia University MFA program in Spring 2014. (www.tatianaberg.com)

Ariel Dill holds a master’s degree from Hunter College. She has exhibited nationally in group and solo exhibitions in spaces including Southfirst, Nicole Klagsbrun, ZeiherSmith, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Her work has been reviewed in publications like The New Yorker and the Huffington Post. (www.http://arieldill.com/)

[Image: Clare Grill “Fits” Oil on Linen (2012)]