James English Leary “In The Back Room”

Nathalie Karg

[Image: James English Leary "Cameo (Plot)" (2018) Acrylic on Shaped Panel, 41 x 46 in.]

This event has ended.

Opening concurrently with Al Held in Paris,1952-53, Nathalie Karg Gallery presents a selection of new and recent works by James English Leary. Using a variety of frameworks, his work enacts dramas of divergent concepts of space and comedies of painting’s tenuous readability.

In the Cameo paintings (top) the profile provides the point of departure for a contoured ground wherein the painted shapes and the painted object refuse to collude. The prescribed shape of the panel instead produces an interruption: the profile becomes a crop, an inverted mask, and a window into a world where creeping forms advance at the periphery and engender camp-psychological states.

In the Entrance paintings (bottom) buoyant shapes come and go from the empty stage of the stretched canvas. Breaching the rectangle, these forms span pictorial and physical space, activating a slapstick ontology of the painting’s constituent parts.

James English Leary (b. Chicago, 1982) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo shows include Carl Kostyál (London), Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (Vienna), and SIM Galeria (Curitiba, Brazil). He is an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union and a founding member of the Bruce High Quality Foundation.