Franklin Evans
FRANKLIN EVANS
paintingassupermodel
5 June - 1 August 2014
Selected Works
Press Release
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce paintingassupermodel, the gallery's first solo exhibition with artist Franklin Evans. Evans presents a new installation comprised of wall painting/collages, eight large paintings, 1,500 square feet of digital prints on paper/canvas/silk, photographic sculptures, floor works, and sculpture vitrines that alter the architecture of the gallery. The exhibition will open on 5 June and will remain on view through 1 August 2014. A public reception for the artist will be held on 5 June from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
Evans alludes to Yve-Alain Bois' 1993 book Painting as Model, using parts of Bois' essays on Mattise, Mondrian, and Newman within the context of his current studio investigations. In addition to the aforementioned artists, these investigations include: Young, Irwin, Giselle, Blue Nude, Romanian Blouse, brian, grid, The Dance, Boogie-Woogie, paint chips, 3-year old, scarface, trompe l'oeil, Halvorson, Guyton, X, Pollock, de Kooning, process, von Heyl, digital recapturing, Dilg, Dupuis, Baltz, Westide Piers, Basel Miami, spine, hands, butt, back, drag, lips, pink, facepaint, arm, wing, flight, floor, primary, secondary, tertiary, derivatives, double negative, Henri, text, arch drawing, energy, field, Weatherford, Jacobs, assistant, fabrication, Kanter, Sololab, DiOrio, Luque, rhizome, measure, clarity, unstretched, object, eyes, smile, orange, Irwin Orange, New York, divisionism, window, wall, photo, Noland, model, financial modeling, Vir Heroicus Sublimus, supermodel, drag queen, markets, belief, Mike Kelley, order, failure, and spreadsheets.
Evans' practice is a network, in constant flux, in absorption of adjacent content, in defocused experience of the contemporary, in rhizomic replication, and in reference to itself. The work occupies the field of painting/installation with studio process and sit as its subject. His work flips between digital and material, process and object, thought and action, and the present and memory. Evans uses art history (often painting history) as a significant input to his practice, and investigations of specific artists become content and media within his unfolding worlds. His interest and self-narrated alignment of his practice to Matisse, Mondrian, and Newman made Bois' three essays on these artists in Painting as Model a focus for Evans. Evans sifts his reading of Bois for content related to his own practice. His work does not illustrate Bois' thought, but rather Evans uses Bois' text become components of Evans' installations. These installations offer synaptic experience of art, the heroic, the functional, and camp.
FRANKLIN EVANS was born in 1967 in Reno, Nevada. He has degrees from Stanford University, University of Iowa, and Columbia University. Since 2005, he has had twelve solo exhibition in the United States and Europe and numerous group exhibitions at venues that include, among others: MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Futura, Prague, Czech Republic; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Federico Luger, Milan, Italy; Sue Scott, New York, NY. His work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, New York Magazine, Artforum, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, Brooklyn Rail, Art-Agenda, Flash Art International, among other publications. Awards and grants include: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; NYFA Fellowship (Painting); PM Foundation; Tribesice; Yaddo; The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program; and LMCC. Evans work is included in the public collections of Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; El Museo del Barrio, New York; NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, CA; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; The Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, OH.