Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of Brooklyn-based artist Barnaby Furnas. The show will be open Saturday, April 27, through Friday, May 24.
Furnas’ paintings and watercolors depict moments of ecstatic violence, passion and internal conflict using shifting perspectives, fractured lines, and explosions. In the artist’s words, these paintings create a situation that "deals with the personal in a historical way and the historical in a personal way". An oppositional dialogue is evident in the paintings, and often results in conflict: suicide, contrasting political views, night and day, man and woman.
This either/or/both mentality is reflected in the way the paintings are made – a drop of red paint serves as a gesture in the abstract action painting sense, analogous to an actual drop of blood in the narrative. The paintings have an improvisational immediacy, allowing a single, decisive moment to be represented by multiple perspectives freezing and expanding that instant in time.
