Keegan McHargue “Topical”
Fredericks & Freiser Gallery
This event has ended.
Fredericks & Freiser presents an exhibition of new paintings by Keegan McHargue. In Topical, McHargue returns to the human figure, albeit broadly shaped, satirical versions. Though their expressions and gestures are generalized, McHargue defines them in surprisingly specific ways. A woman’s lower torso is a single grotesque foot. A butterfly with human legs drifts in outer space. An artist paints the landscape wearing a Colonial hairdo sporting the body of a Centaur. The topographies are identifiable yet seem as intuitive as the figures.
In an essay on the artist, Ross Simonini writes “ McHargue compresses and reduces and distills the image until it functions, like an icon, on the simplest, most unfettered visual wavelength. He thinks about the freedom inherent in minimalism while he works. It keeps his attention focused on the singularity of the idea, so that the image’s energy appears to emerge from a point somewhere deep within itself and ripple outward into a sea of visual ideas, each one nestled into its neighbor, like a liquid puzzle. The feeling of looking is not dissimilar from seeing ancient Islamic and Hindu art, where narrative and space and subject flow into a single current.”
Keegan McHargue (b. 1982) was born in Portland, Oregon. He has had solo shows at Rivington Arms, NY; Metro Pictures, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, and many others. Additionally, he has been featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Deitch Projects, NY; Yvon Lambert, Paris; and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. McHargue’s work is included in the collections of the Deste Foundation of Contemporary Art, Athens; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2015 to October 10, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00