NYAB Event - Paul Benney and Louis Renzoni “Ecliptic”

Paul Benney and Louis Renzoni “Ecliptic”

Dorian Grey Gallery

This event has ended.

‘The ecliptic had inclined itself beyond recovery till life was as thin as the elm trees’. - Plato’s Republic

This exhibition marks Paul Benney’s return to New York’s East Village, where Benney was a familiar figure in the 1980’s and a key member of the East Village avant-garde art scene. The focus of Benney’s work in ‘Ecliptic’ centers on an enclosed candle series titled ‘Autoasphyxiation’. ‘Ecliptic’ will also include Benney’s ‘Dark Mirror’ series, a contemporary version of ancient Scrying Mirrors once used in various types of divination. The works come to America for the first time following their exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecomtemporanea Gallery in Milan. ‘Ecliptic’ will run concurrently with Benney’s exhibition ‘Behind the Silence’ at the Serena Morton gallery in London.

‘Ecliptic’ follows thematically from the major exhibition of Benney’s widely acclaimed show ‘Night Paintings’ at Somerset House, London, where he was an artist-in-residence. ‘Night Paintings’ had an unprecedented 20,000+ visitors. ‘Ecliptic’ brings together Benney’s talents as both a contemporary artist and one of the UK’s most celebrated portrait painters.

Benney’s work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Portrait Gallery London, the National Gallery of Australia as well as prominent private and corporate collections including The US Congress, The Rothschild Foundation, AIG Houston and the Eli Broad Foundation.

A Dorian Grey Gallery alumni, Louis Renzoni returns to the gallery in ‘Ecliptic’ with narrative paintings in his signature classical media- oil, ground pigments and lead whites. Painting in layers, he sands and re-paints until background details disappear, leaving figures that seem to be emerging from places in our own memory. Cloaked in an air of darkness, Renzoni’s enigmatic and romantic oeuvre illuminates our universal cellular memory.

In the early 1980’s, Colin Gardner wrote of Louis Renzoni’s work in Gagosian Gallery’s ‘New Painting and Sculpture from the Lower East Side’: “The highlight was undoubtedly Louis Renzoni’s noir-ish melodramas, a cross between ghostly daguerrotypes and B pictures from the forties. Blurred figures emerge like long-buried pentimento from within amorphous dark-purple and slate-gray backgrounds- vulnerable, mysterious, ambiguous.”

In ‘Ecliptic’, Renzoni debuts new paintings depicting sensual, mysterious and humorous narratives, reflected in domestic objects such as tea kettles, mirrors and silverware. Renzoni’s work is represented in the collections of the Sor Rusche Collection in Berlin, The Museum of Sex, The Lannan Family Foundation as well as prominent private collections.