Andrew Gbur

ANDREW GBUR August 30 – September 30, 2012 | 11 Rivington St & 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is to present an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Andrew Gbur, on view from August 30 – September 30, 2012. Gbur’s solo gallery debut will include two bodies of work spanning the gallery’s two LES locations at 5-year old Eleven Rivington at 11 Rivington Street and our recently opened second location at 195 Chrystie Street. Gbur’s practice is predominately concerned with painting’s reliability as a mode of communication. Using a highly graphic formal and material vocabulary culling traits of post-war painting, Gbur’s enigmatic pseud-modernist canvases zero in on the cultural neuroses surrounding the questionable practice of image-making today.

On view at the 11 Rivington Street space will be three gridded paintings. Dubbed by the artist as “generational defaults,” these pictures borrow from the vernacular of such proto-pop figures as Johns and Rauschenberg: using silkscreen ink, gouache, printing inks and acrylic, Gbur builds a grid full of handmade incident and irregularity. Using this familiar modernist trope as a franchise and matrix, Gbur then populates the pictures with a cryptic assortment of both autobiographical and iconic images (executed in collage, stencil, inkjet and screen print). Gbur employs a riddling index of imagery (self-portraits, signs and symbols) to confound the viewer’s expectations, simulating the grueling and often futile feelings associated with image viewing and image synthesizing in today’s world.

At the 195 Chrystie Street location will be a series of “face paintings.” Using a strictly abbreviated language of color, material and shape, Gbur’s face paintings depict the basic remnants of the human visage. Through an aggressive reduction of visual information, Gbur’s “portraits” do not become clearer but instead become louche, unreliable and often sinister in their ambiguity. Like the gridded works, these stark, stencil-painted canvases belie the more familiar clarity of formalism to explore the more enigmatic, psychologically challenging potentials of abstraction and the mechanically informed image.

Andrew Gbur was born in 1984, educated at the University of the Arts, PA (BFA) and Yale University, CT (MFA), and currently lives and works in Lancaster, PA. He is currently included in the group exhibition ‘First Among Equals’, selected by the artist Alex Da Corte, at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; and was also featured in the most recent ‘Greater New York’ at MoMa PS1, in the section guest-curated by Clarissa Dalrymple.