Reception: Thursday, September 16, 6-8 pm
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Christopher Broughton. The work of this New York-based painter is dominated by linear and illusionistic abstract compositions that recall the early Structural Constellations of Josef Albers as well as the early wall drawings of Sol Lewitt.
Eschewing brushes or a palette knife, Broughton's method of transferring paint to canvas involves the repeated application of taut paint-drenched strings. Using a methodology reminiscent of Mel Bochner's measurement drawings of the late1960s, Broughton uses a progression of mathematical ratios to determine the lengths and placement patterns of string to canvas. The resulting accumulation of lines creates the sensation of looking through a fine mesh at objects lying beneath. By varying paint colors and masking off portions of the canvas, Broughton creates forms suggestive of screens, walls, or enclosures occupying an illusionistic three-dimensional space under the surface.
In a marriage
of evenness and irregularity, Broughton's application of paint produces
a raised surface of gleaming lines, almost like extruded beads of caulk.
The effect produces a tension between control and randomness, the deliberate
and the uncontrolled. Of the accretion of line and color in his work,
Broughton speaks of "the accumulation of time in a painting--lines
as quantifiable and concrete, illusory and measureless."
Christopher Broughton was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1969. He received
an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 1996. In 1998 he was the
recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation studio grant, and in
2001 received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. The artist has lived
and worked in Brooklyn since 1996. This is his first one-person exhibition
in New York.
Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10 to 6; Saturday 11 to 6. For further information please call 212-213-6767.