Myles Carter "Paintings: 1989-2010"

Skoto Gallery

poster for Myles Carter "Paintings: 1989-2010"

This event has ended.

This exhibition spans nearly two decades, including seminal work from his Mail Bag series that were executed during his stay in France in the 1980s, and a selection of recent work that synthesize calligraphic gestures with a fluid compositional organization. His work is dense with visual overload, and reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions spawned by graffiti’s social intervention that flowered spectacularly on the streets and subways of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Myles Carter’s paintings evince vitality, high energy and dramatic impact because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style that focuses less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. He is aware of the relative value of word and image in his work and employs a rich vocabulary of signs and symbols that speak bol dly and clearly to a universal audience.

Much has been said and written about the compromises that graffiti artists like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat among others had to make in order to gain entrance into the rarefied world of high art, and their work became spotlighted in downtown galleries, in the media, and thereafter throughout the world. Like other cultural developments that evolved from the underside of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s, graffiti art was a relevant meditation in words and pictures, on the meaning of identity, property, and city life. It offered the society an intensely visual account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city, and a provocative defense of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics…and as Lowery Sims has observed in her catalogue essay for this exhibition “Myles Carter’s affiliations with various “crews&rdqu o; in the city during this period provided him with both social and artistic cohort, and along with his contemporaries that include the UGA (United Graffiti Artists), TF 5 (The Fabulous 5) and Fab 5 Freddy, Rammelzee and Lady Pink and the like – held the line of authenticity and the true spirit of the graffiti”.

Myles Carter was born 1965 in New York City and grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West side,
in an environment that nurtured creativity – his father Ron is a renowned jazz bassist and his mother was a longtime trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Using the pseudonym “Metro”, in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was associated with “crews” such as RTW – Rolling Thunder Writers- noted for experimentation with unusual brands of paint and getting distinctive results. His move to Paris in the late 1980s - while still in his early 20s – helped broaden his perspectives on art, deepen his consciousness and make the transition from spray-can to the brush. Over the years, he has developed a style that is deeply rooted in a conceptual framework that embodies the aesthetics, ideals and social structures. He has participated in several exhibitions in the US and abroad. His work is in several collections around the world.

Media

Schedule

from October 21, 2010 to November 27, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-10-21 from 18:00 to 20:00
The artist will be present.

Artist(s)

Myles Carter

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