Jerry Kearns “HEARSAY”

Jerry Kearns “HEARSAY”

FROSCH&CO

This event has ended.

FROSCH&CO presents HEARSAY, the gallery’s second solo show by New York based artist Jerry Kearns. Featured alongside two recent paintings, the exhibition marks the debut of Kearns’ drawings.

In HEARSAY, Jerry Kearns navigates human connection in the hyperreal landscape of the present day. The ecstatic consumption of informational and sensorial stimuli sublimates our real desires. Time and space are compressed, everything is at our fingertips, so why do those close to us feel so distant?

Kearns’ paintings engage in a dialogue of internal yet interconnected monologues. Their frames unravel like film. The viewer catches snippets—little glimpses into the individuals’ thoughts—but they sound fragmentary, far away, like overheard conversations in a crowded bar. The cacophony of voices melds into screen noise.

Divided along gender lines, the figures reproduce these misunderstandings in exchanges with the figures opposite them as if straining to hear one another over their own thoughts. Though each monologue can be read independently, they also function as reactions to some perceived other, whether real or internalized. Kearns playfully deconstructs these binaries, often modeling his female figures on stereotypically masculine icons such as cowboys and vice versa. Ultimately, all the characters share similar wants and needs.

The artist examines the dialectical relationship between media and reality by inserting pop culture icons into scenes with anonymous figures and his own loved ones. By poking fun at our para-social bonds with celebrities, Kearns exposes how the expectations we project onto others are shaped by our imaginary relationships to simulacra. The artist mirrors this problematic in his pastiche depiction of everyday people.

HEARSAY asks what would happen if we tried to see past the noise and really listened to each other. In doing so, Kearns invites the viewer to free associate and form connections—to engage in not just a monologue or dialogue but a conversation with the world around them.
Jerry Kearns’ “psychological pop” paintings represent a multidimensional quantum universe. Juxtaposing varied modes of representation, Kearns presents a visual mash- up that highlights how certain iconography expresses American belief structures. In compositions rife with conflict, questioning, contradictions, and intrigue, Kearns depicts iconic figures sourced from Western popular culture engaged in perpetual power struggles, though it’s never clear who is winning. His characters fluctuate between protagonist and antagonist in a narrative that reflects our own constructions of reality—a matrix of thought where time and space are condensed and presented in a single, tense moment.

Jerry Kearns holds an MFA from UC Santa Barbara and has exhibited internationally across the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the 1980s. He has been featured many times in The New York Times, Art and Auction, ARTnews, and Artforum, among others. His paintings are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Galerie (Berlin), Brooklyn Museum (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Norton Family Collection (Los Angeles), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Queensland Art Gallery (Queensland, Australia).

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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