NYAB Event - Jeff Muhs “The Red Rules of Tooth and Claw”

Jeff Muhs “The Red Rules of Tooth and Claw”

Cheryl Hazan Gallery

This event has ended.

Jeff Muhs’ oil paintings thrive on the interaction of colors, division of space, and luxurious sensibility. The tension created in the pressed spaces between hovering masses of rich color activates the dense and saturated atmosphere. Veils of color expand into the space with subtle drips cascading down, leaving a visual path of their history.

The permanence of imagery and art historical movements including modernism, color field painting, and the Renaissance all influence Muhs’ work. His abstract paintings on canvas and panel consist of broad expanses of color with occasional edges of shadow giving them volume. The ethereal atmosphere brings to mind landscape and large bodies of water, similar to the landmasses and sea near where Muhs grew up in Southampton, New York. In another series of his, imagery borrowed from Renaissance painters such as Titian and Ingres seems to be seen through a hazy lens - edges are muted giving an intangible presence. This imagery is paired with a broad area of saturated color, as if he is melding modernism with classicism. Whatever battle would have existed between the two is dissolved and a new symbiotic existence is established.

Jeff Muhs received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988. His work is in collections at the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, Time Warner, Inc, New York, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hunter Museum, Tennessee and Ward Museum, Maryland. He has been included in numerous exhibitions including shows in New York, California, Colorado, and Texas. Most recently he was included in the Young Masters Art Exhibition in London at Sphinx Fine Art and Gallery 27.

[Image: Jeff Muhs “The Red Rules of Tooth and Claw” 62” x 74”, oil on canvas 2013]