NYAB Event - Jack Early Exhibition

Jack Early Exhibition

Fergus McCaffrey (514 W 26th St.)

This event has ended.

Fergus McCaffrey presents a new body of paintings and sculptures by Jack Early in his largest solo exhibition to date.
The gallery will also be hosting a press preview; please contact Alexandra von Stumberg McCaffrey (contact information below) for further details.

Jack Early was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1962, and his aesthetic roots in the South represent a distinct and contrasting perspective within the generation of artists who emerged in the early 1990s and addressed race and gender politics, gay rights, and AIDS, while critiquing the authority of cultural institutions.

Some of Early’s ideas on these matters were touched upon early in his career with his then partner, Rob Pruitt, in their short-lived Pruitt- Early collaboration. Their art was upbeat, inclusive, tongue in cheek, and coyly provocative; it stood in contrast to others of that generation who adopted different means to address the issues of their time. Early’s current work, while maintaining some of the spirit of that period, is focused more directly on his own storytelling, revealing a candid openness and evident joy and pathos in the work. Early has an eye for icons, both old and new.

In keeping with the artist’s fascination with the popular culture of his childhood and adolescence, Early’s fourth show with Fergus McCaffrey will feature lusciously rendered, large-scale, photo-realist paintings of Popsicles, figurative works, and breakfast cereal, alongside soft, freestanding sculptures of family members and household objects; all of them are painted and printed onto a silkscreened replica of his boyhood wallpaper of toy soldiers, reworked to be holding hands and in an array of colors. These works will be musically accompanied by a Victrola playing Early’s own performance of his autobiographical “Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes.”

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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