NEW YORK, NY.- Julia Seabrook Gallery brought in Chip Haggerty – a brutish New England painter and reluctant outsider – in from the cold with his first ever New York City solo exhibition. The show, on view since April 20 through May 28, 2023, at Julia Seabrook Gallery, 660 Franklin Ave., Crown Heights, Brooklyn, will open with a reception and the artist present.

Chip Haggerty: Boy Meets World presents 49 paintings that touch on themes drawn from quotidian stresses: gravity, traffic, food, people. A list of herbs and spices for a recipe becomes a threat. Some Warholesque bananas become a decorative frieze. Collections of sunglasses and ballet slippers take on repetitive relevance. There are scenes of skiers and snow from his adopted home in Vermont. But bowing to his New York City roots, Haggerty also includes Gotham cityscapes, traffic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the subway, and Central Park.

“One of my earliest memories is standing on a stool at an old porcelain utility sink in murky fluorescence holding paint brushes under running water as a preschooler at City and Country in Greenwich Village in the late ‘50s. It took me six decades of wandering to get back to painting, but back to it I got,” said Haggerty.

Like many of those who are self-taught, Haggerty’s work harkens to that of French art brut pioneer Jean Dubuffet’s with its primary color palette, its reliance on experimental materials and techniques, and its raw expressionism.

Curated by gallerist Nicole Abe Titus, the show also features works by others who made successful transitions from the world of outsider art to prominence in the fine art universe. Haggerty’s paintings will be complemented by works that resonate in style, substance or genesis including Henri Rousseau, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, Jean Dubuffet, Clementine Hunter, Adolf Wölfli, Mose Tolliver and Henry Darger.