Andrew Masullo “Recent Paintings”

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

This event has ended.

What does an artist do with paintings he can’t finish? Or with finished paintings he once embraced but now rejects? Andrew Masullo answers these questions in silver, red, and white for his first exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

With limited colors and shapes, Andrew Masullo rejects past painting concerns in favor of celebrating the many years he spent wrestling recalcitrant paintings. Shimmering silver paint highlights the struggle, preserving canvases in mid-stream as artifacts, as reminders of what might have been. Red and white paint prominently display Masullo’s reference information — number title, years of toil, maker’s name — on these artifacts and vie with silver as the paintings’ prime subject matter.

Andrew Masullo was born in 1957 and hails from Roselle Park, NJ. He graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art from Rutgers University but his true art education occurred during the 22 years he lived in Manhattan (he now lives in San Francisco but still considers himself “a New York painter through and through”). A selection of his solo exhibitions include those with galleries fiction/nonfiction (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991), André Emmerich (1994, 1996), Joan Washburn (2000, 2002, 2004), Feature Inc. (2010), Mary Boone (2013), and Tibor de Nagy (2015) all in New York; Paule Anglim in San Francisco (2000, 2006, 2008, 2012); Daniel Weinberg (2007, 2009, 2011) and Zevitas/Marcus (2016) in Los Angeles; Steven Zevitas in Boston (2007, 2011, 2015); Texas Gallery in Houston (2009, 2014); Susanne Hilberry in Detroit (2014); and a retrospective with Thomas Ammann Fine Art in Zurich (1999). His paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in their 2012 Biennial, as well as their recent group exhibit “Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s.” He received a Guggenheim foundation fellowship in 2011.