Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Continental Drift, an exhibition featuring six artists who approach painting through a variety of mediums; Karen Barbour, Alain Biltereyst, Peter Böhnisch, Jeffrey Cheung, Alicia McCarthy, and Paul Wackers.
Paul Wackers’ still-lives overflow with familiar abstracted objects that have a lively intensity. The work featured, Folding, whose subject, a houseplant, and style, boldly expressive geometric shapes through a varied application of paint, is a hallmark of Wackers’ work. The richly colored figures of Jeffrey Cheung playfully twist and embrace in a never-ending tangle of limbs celebrating freedom and community. These same figures are the visual models for Unity, a queer skate-boarding community found- ed by Cheung in The San Francisco Bay Area. Next, Peter Böhnisch, a Berlin-based artist, uses a unique application of layered colored sand, enlivened by confident, swift gestures. In I am there/1, his gestures give the impression that the coy figure is seemingly unraveling in a flurry of wind, a compelling contrast with the coarseness of his surfaces.
The painted worlds of Karen Barbour take on a whimsical and metaphysical presence, evoked by their mixed influence of decorative pattern, folklore, imagination, and real life. Her works in the exhibition are fantastical, jewel-like pieces that defy the rules of light and gravity linked to our world. Alicia McCarthy, notably grouped with the San Francisco Mission artists of the 1990s, creates work from unconventional media, like house paint and discarded wood. Her loosely interwoven colors, restrained visual language, and use of found objects, in this case an artist’s flat file, is characteristic of her work and exemplifies her intrigue with the imperfections of her materials. Alain Biltereyst’s brushy, layered paintings celebrate the simplicity of abstraction. His works, inspired by his background in graphic design, isolate the forms of collected advertisements and logos until they are rendered unrecognizable, andtransformed into composed, angular configurations.
For further information please contact Sophie Becker at sophie@jackhanley.com