NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Roy Dowell. The artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery will open on 3 February at 511 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 12 March 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Ed Schad.

Dowell’s commitment to gathering and combining images is at the heart of his practice. The disparate qualities of collage and assemblage are rendered in acrylic paint on linen over panel. From early in his career, the artist has engaged with a layering of diverse and scattered references from all over the world, both iconic and personal, working and reworking his materials until they are remade into something with visual impact. His use of color, pattern, folk motifs, and design elements, all with the presence of a handmade and open touch, stems from an appreciation and interest in world cultures and self-taught arts.

Schad explains that in Dowell’s practice, the ability for the viewer to move between and beyond referential registers is part of the open spirit of the work. “Many of Dowell’s recent paintings have organizing features (circles, diamonds, open umbrellas, crosses, carbide blades) that then wander, dissolve, radiate, run, or simply ease into the pattern and texture, and the compositional oddities that unseat their primacy. They stare at you, hold you at attention, then soften and deepen into intricate personalities. Dowell’s canvases, most often vertical, hold abstraction inside their frames like the beliefs and fantasies of individual brains, so often laced with idiosyncrasy and speaking in their own dialects.”

In blending various shapes and colors together, Dowell’s paintings convey emotional power through complicated and textured forms of reflection, joy, and pain, all at once. “This work, and in fact all of my work, attempts to engage, challenge and provoke the viewer. I ask questions and invite a dissection and decoding of my work from my audience. I ask the viewer to find themselves in my work. I don’t offer answers. There is no definitive conclusion or right answer,” Dowell elaborates. The paintings draw the viewer into the image. More rigid designs become tender and human through the process of visual perception and interpretation.