Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Barnaby Furnas.
This will be the artist’s fourth solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery. For this exhibition, Furnas returns to themes that have fascinated him for some time including a poignant passage from the Civil War era: the surrender of John Brown, the abolitionist crusader. He will also exhibit a series of black flood paintings as well as a series of rock concert paintings. In this new body of work Furnas continues to use his inventive painting techniques including pouring paint across the surface, burning holes to make marks, and incorporating controlled splashing and optical patterning. These are beautiful devices in themselves and are also vehicles for imparting content into the paintings. These tactile techniques interact with the picture plane often converging with what they are depicting – as in the burned out suns of an apocalyptic night landscape which are produced by the artist burning a hole in the canvas and into the stretcher bar. Furnas conveys that night has erased the sun. Furnas is interested in vast array of cultural sources from video games and other forms of mass culture to the history of painting and the philosophy of perception.
Furnas has often taken on the most monumental and tradition bound subject matter. By combining in the same show, war and martyrdom with the indulgent experience of a rock concert, Furnas is in a sense leveling these experiences to a single point of tension. While one is truly profound and dangerous, the other is contained, safe and temporary, but an intense and possibly moving experience.
A comprehensive book on the artist’s work, with a text by Shamin Momin and an interview by Carroll Dunham, will be published next year by Harry N. Abrams.
Barnaby Furnas will have a mid career survey at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art in 2010. He was also included in: Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, New York, Wall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York The Old, Weird America, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna The Fractured Figure,” Deste Foundation, Athens“Dream and Trauma: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Kunsthalle Wien and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna Art in America: Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China – contemporary portion of “Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation,” organized by the Guggenheim Museum.
