Henry Swanson “My Mom Can Drive, If Your Mom Can Pick Up”

Anna Zorina

[Image: Henry Swanson "Masculin Feminine" (2017) mixed media on canvas 50 x 47 in.]

This event has ended.

One Henry Swanson painting says to the other,
“Honey, I think we should get the kids another dog.”

The second painting takes a deep inhale of its Winston before putting out the cigarette on the other painting’s forearm. Looking out vacantly over the expansive lanai, exhales with a puff of smoke:
“No. I think one dog is enough for now.”

My Mom Can Drive, If Your Mom Can Pick Up is Henry Swanson’s first exhibition with the Gallery featuring his latest body of work, comprised of oil paintings and mixed media installation. The exhibition explores the opposite ends of the universally banal and unattractive ether of his youth in Dallas, Texas. The artist’s works drift from under-construction suburban mansions, ripe with privilege and ambivalence, to escort service calling cards in karaoke bar bathrooms, to children’s parties gone awry with alcoholism.

Swanson’s New York debut solo exhibition looks into the destruction of naivety and pop’s coding of the modern social experience – with a particular interest in performed wealth and self-sabotage. Stylistically wedged between ‘country club’ and ‘FM radio hotline t-shirt’, the artist’s paintings depict environments of stress and dysfunction emphasized by bold color palettes. Born of a vocabulary full of cartoon imagery and hand-painted signs, Swanson’s newest work moves further away from jocular boyhood shame and perversion, but loses no ground on its sarcastic enthusiasm. My Mom Can Drive, If Your Mom Can Pick Up explores themes of deception, esoteric interactions, and flawed interpersonal experience.

Henry Swanson (b. 1993, Dallas, Texas) lives and works in Houston, Texas. The artist received his BFA at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island. He recently completed a residency and had a solo exhibition at the Goss-Michael Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Patron Magazine, Modern Luxury Dallas, Unvarnished Magazine, and Artist Uprising Magazine.