NYAB Event - “Last Night I Had a Glimpse of the Good Life” Exhibition

“Last Night I Had a Glimpse of the Good Life” Exhibition

Thierry Goldberg

This event has ended.

Thierry-Goldberg Gallery presents Last Night I Had a Glimpse of the Good Life, a three-person exhibition with new work by Austin Eddy, Anthony Miler, and Alexandria Smith.

Anthony Miler’s paintings in the front room of the gallery depict otherworldly figurations with a mix of blurred neon spray paint, aggressive black brush strokes, graphite, and acrylic. Looking back to artists like Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, Miler approaches his process intuitively and seeks to capture a sense of primal, almost childlike psychological state. When there is a face and an expression, Miler explains, it’s a quick and strong way to get a visceral dialogue. And it’s not tied to artifice or something that’s academic or disconnectedly conceptual. It’s very psychological and emotive, it looks back at you.

In a similar sense, Alexandria Smith also explores childhood and glimpses of narratives in her work. Assembling mismatched patterns, floating body parts, and dream like spaces, Smith begs the viewer to question the tension between what is play, violence, and preadolescent innocence. As though her scenes derive from a dream or eerie wonderland, Smith’s paintings evoke a sense of childhood nostalgia, with a distinctly contrasting environment, as doll-like subjects are depicted either at play or perhaps in harm’s way.

Austin Eddy presents another take on dreamy narratives in the back of the gallery. Dapper men smoking pipes and wearing top hats, houses on wheels, and figures crying rivers are some of Eddy’s melancholic scenes of longing and loneliness. In the painting titled, Last Night I Had a Glimpse of the Good Life, also the title of the exhibition, a man in a large top hat is shown smoking, with a glass of wine next to a fragment of a woman’s face, as the moon romantically peers over both figures and smoke fills the air, while the limited color palette nods to early modernism and emphasis is put onto shape, transition and line.

Austin Eddy (b. 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL in 2009. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Bendixen Contemporary Art Gallery in Copenhagen, DK; Roberto Paradise in San Juan, PR; The Horticultural Society, New York, NY; Important Projects, Oakland, CA; and Golden Gallery, Chicago, IL. Previous group exhibitions include Lamontagne Gallery, Boston, MA; Freight and Volume, New York, NY; and Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY. Eddy’s work has been reviewed and mentioned in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out Chicago, and Modern Painters Daily.

Anthony Miler (b. 1982) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from The City College of New York, and a BFA from Adrian College, MI. His work has been exhibited at ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY; Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA; Waterhouse & Dodd, New York, NY; Garis & Hahn, New York, NY; Brooklyn Fire Proof, Brooklyn, NY; and Regina Rex, Brooklyn, NY.

Alexandria Smith (b. 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2010, and her BFA from Syracuse University in 2003. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA; R. Ingraham Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and Rush Arts Gallery in New York, NY. Previous group shows include Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; Leroy Neiman Art Center, New York, NY; and The Kitchen, New York, NY.