NYAB Event - Gary Rough Exhibition

Gary Rough Exhibition

Fergus McCaffrey (514 W 26th St.)

[Image: Gary Rough "No" (2007) Gaffer tape on paper. 12 1/8 x 9 in.]

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Fergus McCaffrey presents an exhibition of mixed-media sculptures and works on paper by Gary Rough.

Rough’s practice is conceptual, appropriational, and expressionist. For his second exhibition at Fergus McCaffrey, he has gathered together prefabricated metal bathroom stalls, custom neon lighting, recycled wood sculptures, and his own distinctly crafted works on paper to create an installation that daubs high-church Minimalism and Conceptualism with the slapdash paintwork and carnality of any well-worn New York City dive bar.

The artist’s vocabulary of idiosyncratically rendered hearts, crosses, fetishized amputated legs, scribbled textual confessions, and thunderbolts unites Rough’s work through a distinct narrative voice. His texts and sculptural forms, which are sourced from the street or are personally composed, display a disturbing and volatile mix of explicit rage, tender intimacy, and frank confession.

Rough was born in the proudly working-class city of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1972. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Glasgow was decimated by the collapse of its heavy manufacturing industry—much like Detroit today. In both cases, this brought about economic ruin, rampant unemployment, and urban decay, all of which helped to accelerate the ongoing decline of male authority. Rough is a child of those times, and his work touches on the universally complex bravado and fragility of the male psyche today.

The aesthetic of Rough’s bathroom stall paintings is distinctly DIY, making use of a cultivated awkwardness and stumbling staccato of words and imagery that are applied, over-painted, reapplied, stained, beaten, sanded down, covered over, and scarred again. The explicitness of his drawings in Biro and nail varnish on notebook paper, his duct-tape word collages, and his neon text sculptures evince a working man’s Dionysian aesthetic that is both breathtaking and touching.

Rough’s previous exhibition at the gallery, in 2007, was an imagining—with the author’s permission—of Rabo Karabekian’s Sateen Dura-Luxe paintings mentioned in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Bluebeard. Literature continues to be a touchstone of his work, with George Orwell and Albert Camus much to the fore.

Recent solo exhibitions include Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc… . , Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2011; I Want to Tell You, Number 35, New York, 2009; Nothing Is Enough, Yvon Lambert, Paris, 2008; The Crisis of Confidence, Sleeper, Edinburgh, 2007; Take Me With You, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2006; Who Is Everything, MoMA PS1, New York, 2004; and Skies of Blue, University of Brighton, 2004. Rough holds a BA and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and he attended the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. He lives and works in New York City.