Barnaby Furnas

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of new paintings by Barnaby Furnas.  Please note our new address:  509 West 24^th Street, New York, NY.

 

This will be Barnaby’s third solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery.  For this exhibition, Furnas will show works depicting themes that include monumental floods, the parting of the red sea, the prophet/martyr, the accursed and images in effigy.  Furnas is known for his paintings of historical battle scenes, suicides, lovers, and rock and roll concerts.  In this new body of work his subjects have gone from their real life precedents to their mythic and religious realms.  While still depicting dramatic and ecstatic states of the human condition, Furnas now takes on the religious dimension of these subjects directly.

 

Furnas’ technique of painting has developed and expanded in this new body of work.  It remains fluid and layered and painted on the horizontal.  However, now it has become more physical, with the artist interacting with the picture plane.  In the largest flood works, up to 30 feet in width, the paint is poured from one end of the canvas to the other, with the canvas held aloft in a diagonal position, and the artist directing the paint across the surface.  In some works, he uses calf skin canvases with the irregular shape of the dead animal stretched over the frame, literally taking on the subject matter of the paintings.  In others he employs an oil and water resistant technique, which creates fluorescent skeletal images of the martyred figure on a black background that glow with a seeming inner light. 

 

Furnas will also exhibit watercolors – in some of these new works, the artist burns holes in the surfaces, splashes them with spirits and covers the background with Celtic curses.  These are deeply personal and cathartic works that address greed and dishonesty in contemporary society. 

 

Furnas was most recently included in “Imagination Becomes Reality, Part IV”, at the Sammlung Goetz, Munich in June.  He will also be included in “USA Today,” at the Royal Academy of Art, London in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery and will be featured in the “Focus” series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  In the Spring of 2007, he will be included in “Between Two Deaths,” curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin, at the Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany.