NYAB Event - Michael Reafsnyder Exhibition

Michael Reafsnyder Exhibition

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

This event has ended.

AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE announces an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Reafsnyder. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dave Hickey.

Michael Reafsnyder is among the small but prominent group of artists revivifying painterly traditions spawned by Abstract Expressionism. Featuring densely filled compositions executed in brilliant color, Reafsnyder’s paintings utilize a full inventory of application techniques; acrylic paint is dragged, smeared, swiped, piled, scraped, brushed, pushed-aside, re-formed and squeegeed onto stretched linen. Despite the appearance of effortless spontaneity, each gesture is deliberately placed, carefully crafted, and thoughtfully labored over.

With uncommon technical refinement, Reafsnyder’s frenetic and dense compositions refuse to give up pleasure, abundance, and joy. Boldly supplying intense visual energy, his fiercely civilized abstractions are serious about putting painting’s repressed pleasures back into the picture. As one critic noted, “Reafsnyder’s practice is anachronistic, gestural, and gloriously impractical. It revives an interest in painting’s sensual aspects not often seen since Ingres spoke luridly of the artist’s brush as an extension of his own hand and eye.”

Michael Reafsnyder has spoken of paintings outrageous capacity for frivolity, lusciousness, and sensuousness. Seeking to avoid convoluted theories of interiority, expressionism, truth, and authenticity, Reafsnyder’s paintings “wreak havoc on conventional wisdom about abstract painting.”