NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery opened an exhibition of recent paintings by Franklin Evans. fugitivemisreadings, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 31 July 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.
We inhabit a highly visual world where images substitute words as vehicles for communication and interpretation. Embracing the nature of hybridity and relishing in unexpected juxtapositions, Evans is an artist who rejoices in painting’s ability to assimilate new visual languages and technologies. His painting celebrates this time-tested medium as powerfully coexistent to the visual overload of digital media. His work lives between digital and material, process and object, thought and action, and present and memory.
Analogous to an art historical lexicon, Evans has long explored the artist’s studio. He uses art history as a significant input to his practice as investigations of specific artists become content and media within his unfolding world. His latest body of work is rich with details from modern masters and accomplished contemporaries. Evans gives new energy to the many artists who inspire him. Ranging in “stylistic diversity from geometric abstraction to trompe l’oeil, the paintings yield little resemblance to the artists they reference,” and are fusions of signatures and cross references.
In decenteringfacespace, Evans emphasizes a view of the art world that flattens hierarchy as emerging and underrecognized artists decenter a canon of established artists. Recalling Matisse’s Joy of Life, 1905, the painting joyoflife2019 breaks down, doubles and reconfigures Matisse’s masterpiece in a digitally mediated maneuver in homage to a twentieth-century tour de force. In reference to his painting pigmentpolymersplatspace, Evans states that “a dizzying repetitive world explodes, an untethered splat of repeated faces extracted from art: Alice Neel, Roy Lichtenstein, and Kerry James Marshall, and, most poignantly Jacob Lawrence.”
In his essay on Evans, Rubinstein asserts, “In his anthological paintings and installations woven from countless art-historical citations, Evans subsumes his own identity into the visual heritage of the past (and present), confronts questions of originality and innovation and—last but not least—invokes the artists in his own pantheon with an intensity that borders on obsession.”
FRANKLIN EVANS (b. 1967, Reno, NV) received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1989 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1993.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions including “franklinfootpaths,” Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; “fugitivemisreadings,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “selfportraitas,” FL Gallery, Milan, Italy; “paintingpainting,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery, New York, NY; “XLtime,” Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; “spreadsheetspace,” Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger, Norway; “headandhandinhand,” Spazio 22 - FL Gallery, Milan, Italy; “juddpaintings,” Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA; “juddrules,” Montserrat Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; “paintingassupermodel,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery, New York, NY; “timepaths,” Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; “houstontohouston,” Diverse Works, Houston, TX; “flatbedfactum02,” Federico Luger, Milan, Italy; and “eyesontheedge,” Sue Scott Gallery, New York, NY.
Select group exhibitions include: “Net Jumps,” Galleria Allegra Ravizza, Lugano, Switzerland; “HyperGames,” FL Gallery, Milan, Italy; “Pole Santa Marta,” Contemporary/Contemporary, Verona, Italy; “Notebook,” 56 Henry, New York, NY; “Manet to Maya Lin,” Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; “Color Compositions,” Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY; “Legacy: Highlights from the Roanoke College Permanent Collection,” Olin Gallery, Salem, VA; “ICASTICA 2015: Cultivating Culture,” La Fondazione Ivan Bruschi, Arezzo, Italy; “Abstraction,” Fondation pour l’art contemporain Salomon, Annecy, France; “Paint Things,” deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; “Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show,” Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; “Greater New York 2010,” MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; “Collision,” RISD Museum, Providence, RI; “NY/Prague 6,” Futura, Prague, Czech Republic; “Bienal: The (S) Files 007,” El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; “Art on Paper 2006,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; “Metaphysics of Youth,” Fuoriuso-Artenova, Pescara, Italy; “LineAge: Selections Fall 2005,” The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and “The Zine Unbound,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.
His work is included in select collections including AGI Verona, Verona, Italy; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Fondation pour l’art contemporain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, Alex, France; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Roanoke College, Salem, VA; Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
He is a recipient of the 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY; The Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL in 2017; National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH in 2016; Kennedy-Artist-In- Residence, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL in 2016; Cosmopolitan/Art Production Fund P3Studio (collaboration with Kate Gilmore), Las Vegas, NV in 2015; NYFA Fellowship Painting 2015; PM Foundation Residency, Dorado, Puerto Rico in 2012; and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation: The Space Program, New York, NY in 2009, among others.
Franklin Evans lives and works in New York, NY.
