Ridley Howard “City Waves”
Koenig & Clinton
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Koenig & Clinton announces City Waves, its third solo exhibition of new works by Ridley Howard. The paintings included in the exhibition represent the culmination of a decade-long investigation into the subtle connections between painting and image, depiction and restraint, flatness of color and expansive depth.
The imagery presented in City Waves conjures fleeting memory and traces of the artist’s autobiography, simultaneously intimate and distant. Time and space meld into graphic composition; such familiar sights as a commuter ferry, a snow-covered park, or a couple in repose, amplify our perception of dimensionality, color, and duration. Howard’s keen observations of the familiar or the mundane yield an experience far more complex than it initially appears.
Inspired in part by the visual tension of mid-20th century Italian cinematography, City Waves balances optical design and two-dimensional arrangement with elusive narrative. Occasional graphic overtures—large spiraling swaths of pale green, off-kilter skyscrapers, monochromatic playground structures—imbue banal architectural spaces with intrigue, encouraging the viewer to identify the point where fact ends and fiction begins.
The works on view absorb diverse visual influences, including art historical traditions ranging from early Renaissance, both American and European Modernism, late Pop and contemporary portraiture. These and other cultural references rest beneath the work’s surface, creating a historically rich and highly personal vocabulary. Howard continues to sidestep traditional oppositions between abstract and referential painting strategies, and instead brings them into close proximity as a means of refining their mutual contribution to experiential impact.
The shapes and objects that gather on Howard’s canvases, rigorously considered and deftly executed, cement the works in the realm of painting. Playing with form by reducing a window to a rectangle, and softening lines, if not blurring them, are methods by which the artist’s everyday surroundings are distilled. In turn, our perception is lengthened, the mystery of the scene is elevated, and a quiet drama begins to unfurl.
Media
Schedule
from October 30, 2014 to December 13, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-10-30 from 18:00 to 20:00