Current Exhibition
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EXHIBITION:
DATES: September 18 - October 31, 2008
RECEPTION: Thursday, Sept 18, 6-8pm
Duston Spear's new series, Floating World, works to contain the epic battles fought on each canvas through collaged oil paintings and work clothes, spray paint, and wax on canvas. Her legions of warriors are conscripted into service in this internal civil war; foot soldiers, horse men and archers form battalions locked in close combat. In this, her personal theater of war, the figures align as a contemporary History Painting within a narrative embodying a social message of recent past. From Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) to Barnaby Furnas' Hamburger Hill (2002), Spear elevates her own social ideals through historical events within the borders of this grand genre. She follows in the tradition of creating beauty out of certain destruction.
Spear has collaged her warriors onto canvases by unsentimentally destroying her previous paintings, each one carrying its own individual biography. If "the life of an object reflects the history of its accumulated significances", the paintings of Floating World bely the visual and emotional history of Spear herself. After dropping out of the artworld in the late 1980s due to a medical crisis within her family, she re-emerged an artist filled with the chronicals of her own life. Like Lee Krasner before her, Spear is never one to linger. She too cut up her own past and made a clean break of it in Floating World.
Floating World is Spear's third solo show with Sara Tecchia Roma New York. It follows READ (2005), Delivered (2007), during which she curated, The Accidentally Real, which included the work of Nancy Spero, Eve Sussman, Susan Crile, and Amanda Williams among others. Her work can be found in some of the most prestigious private and public collections around the world including The Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Public Library, the Private Collection of Nancy Spero, The Coca-Cola Collection, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, NC, The High Museum in Atlanta, GA, and the Delta Airlines Collection among others. Spear is currently in an exhibition at the Morris Museum entitled Timeless: The Art of Drawing on view from September 30 through December 21, 2008.
SARA TECCHIA ROMA NEW YORK is located at 529 West 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue. The gallery is on the second floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm or by appointment. For more information, contact 212-741-2900, info@saratecchia.com or visit www.saratecchia.com