DAVID KORTY

Howl

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, March 16, 7–10pm

March 16 – April 20, 2019  

Night Gallery is excited to present Howl, an exhibition of new paintings by esteemed Los Angeles based painter David Korty.

This new body of work is a departure from Korty’s earlier regiment of formalism. His “Word Painting” and “Shelf Painting” series were defined by very strict parameters such as limiting himself to a singular blue or framing each composition with a border. Here he has let loose and allowed for more colors, expression, and at times humor, resulting in energetic, animated figuration.

Each piece in this exhibition utilizes Korty’s signature collage and painting technique to construct cartoonish, mouselike humanoid figures set within deep chromatic fields of mustard yellow, spruce green, crimson, royal blue and orange. The collaged elements are composed of black and white fragments of rubbings, monoprints, and gestural brushstrokes of ink on paper. By employing simple methods and a specifically defined palette to create these elements, Korty is able to devote himself fully to the pained and precise structuring of each composition. The viewer is made aware of this process by additive and subtractive marks which create a tension and illusionistic quality within fields of color that at first glance appear clean and unmarked.

Though aesthetically timeless, Korty’s new works speak distinctly to this moment in history. The figures, with their rigidly straightened arms, uplifted shoulders, and pointing fingers, take on a Nixonian presence. The pointing finger is a new icon within Korty’s lexicon that is repeated throughout the paintings, alluding to reductive social media interactions and the prevailing political culture of castigation that has been fueled by the internet. This is accomplished with a particular subtlety that is more playful than didactic. Korty’s paintings appear simple at first but with time their many immaterial, compositional, and chromatic intricacies reveal themselves to the viewer.


David Korty (b. San Francisco, CA, 1971) received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has shown extensively in Los Angeles, in solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, China Art Objects, Michael Kohn, and LAXART, at Derek Eller Gallery and Greene Naftali in New York, and at Sadie Coles HQ in London. Korty's work has been acquired by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, Los Angeles, the Judith Rothschild Foundation, and the Rubell Collection. His work has been covered in Artforum, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Modern Painters, among other publications. A monograph of Korty's work entitled Blue Shelves was published by Sadie Coles and Night Gallery in 2016. Korty lives and works in Los Angeles.

Above: "Figure on lavender with orange ears," 2019

RIDLEY HOWARD

Shapes and Lovers

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, March 16, 7–10pm

March 16 – April 20, 2019

Night Gallery is pleased to present Shapes and Lovers, a solo exhibition of new works by the Athens, Georgia-based painter Ridley Howard. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Ridley Howard’s oil paintings depict figures in private moments against backdrops of geometric abstraction, simplified architecture, and landscapes. Interceded upon by bold graphics, Howard’s intimate scenes lose the specificity of context, becoming atemporal vignettes starring familiar but unplaceable characters. His tightly cropped compositions often leave out details that would direct the viewer’s sense of narrative, heightening the formal qualities of the bodies and clothes against the flat planes that surround them. These tableaus take on the indistinct quality of memories in an era of stock imagery and cinema, rendering even the throes of passion with a camera’s cool neutrality. That the works take two dramatically different scales – monumental works appear side-by-side with canvases only a few inches in area – further complicates the artist's depiction of intimacy, evoking the silver screen as well as the lens. Nevertheless, the viewer can find the sensuality of Howard’s erotic imagery reflected in the delicate craftsmanship of his compositions, characterized by soft brushstrokes and carefully balanced color relationships. There is palpable tenderness in the soft light of Howard’s figures and zeal in the exuberant colors of his abstracted spaces.

Gesturing in equal parts to minimalist compositions, movie poster design, snapshot photography, impressionistic landscapes, and pop art, Howard’s works harken back to artistic forebearers while combining their anachronistic styles with a distinctly contemporary effortlessness. The slight banality of Howard’s scenes is another marker of the artist’s present-day sensibility – even sexually explicit scenes are conveyed with unblinking straightforwardness, in marked contrast to the censorious era his figures evoke. The palatable seduction of Howard’s style gradually gives way to images that exist in unclassifiable space and time, uniting the dreamlike quality of memory with the disorienting poetics of abstraction.


Ridley Howard (b. 1973, Atlanta, GA) earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1999 and his BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia in 1996. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Atlanta Contemporary; the National Academy Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN. Howard currently lives and works in Athens, GA.

Above: "Motel Pool," 2019.

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