Graham Collins: Scenics, November 5th thru January 15th, 2023

Graham Collins: Scenics, On view November 5th - December 10th, 2022. 

In Scenics, small ceramic supports covered in hemp linen and casein paint, present a frontal view of a type of minimal painting.  The paintings hold a poetic sensibility to surface and color while simultaneously invoking the material history of the relationship between scenic painters and the props they create. A simple visuality in the paintings belies the labor behind the scenic display, much like in the theater suggested by the term. This is possibly best described in the artist’s own words, (or terms) as “histrionic minimalism.”  

While the majority of conceptual context and expressive content seem to be consolidated into the polychrome glazed surfaces and tiered construction of supports at which the viewer is given only a partial glimpse, we are aware of the entirety of the form preceding the painted surface.  The sides of the paintings offer a type of slow forensic architecture that moves our bodies from side to side. We are excited to solve the rest of the form before we begin to grasp the fact that the artist has moved us away from the front of a painting and directed us toward examining the support networks of labor and conceptualism that animate the object. 

Much like Collins' previous work encompassing tinted monochrome canvases in reclaimed wood frames, or large-scale canvases sewn together from scraps of found paintings, we are first stopped by an apparently literal reference to minimalist works, but are then slowly escorted through a material excavation that emphasizes the humanity behind the austere image. Diverging from the tradition of dematerialization and anti-aesthetics in critical painting, Collins' work attempts to place aesthetics of both physical and psychic labor behind a painting while articulating a discourse of material connectivity, of ceramics and painting, earth and meaning made of the earth.

In addition to a group of paintings on ceramic supports, Scenics includes a large-scale textile work occupying the entrance to the gallery, made with a cotton ripstop fabric (commonly associated with technical or military garments) dyed with marigold flowers. The woven grid-pattern of the cloth surface and the random, yet concentrated, monochrome dye application of this work both function as points of reference to historical notions of painterly space and process, and act as a foil to the highly articulated nature, intimate scale and material rigidity of the casein works. 

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Graham Collins (b. 1980, Washington, D.C.) received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art in Washington and his MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey McKay Gallery, New York and East Hampton, New York; The Journal, Brooklyn, NY; Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium; Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, France; Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, United Kingdom. His work has been featured in various group exhibitions, most recently at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, California; C. Grimaldis, Baltimore, Maryland; Marlborough Contemporary, New York, New York. Collins’ work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the North Carolina Museum of Art. He currently lives and works in New York and is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.