 untitled, 2004, oil on canvas, 48" x 60"' Tom McGrath Tom McGrath's recent paintings are American landscapes. With wide-ranging and studied naturalism, Tom offers us images of the picturesque margins-highway on-ramps, strip malls, greenery seen from a speeding car, a car accident - all visualized through a kind of distortion and disjunction that refers to our contemporary apprehension of these spaces. There is a whoosiness and dreamlike quality in these pictures as the viewer negotiates collapsing perspectives and optical uncertainties. McGrath's paintings feature a temporality that points to the constructed nature of perception as we move through aconstructed environment. The mood of these pictures range from detached melancholy to ecstatic psychedelia. Atmosphere and unexplainable weather π function as the filter through which the loose connections of sights become fluid as associations abound-iconic road movies, the cool stranger rolling into town, the song on the radio about the long trip home. Punctuations in the landscape undulating hills, lights, and signs- expose the contradiction between lyrical painting and stark postindustrial imagery. The result evokes the experience of seeing the familiar in a slightly unfamiliar way. For McGrath, the word landscape is a verb. As in all landscape painting, there is a challenge at stake in the territory between the viewer and the world. These highways andscenes on the outskirts become interiors- maps of a fragmented mind or a schizophrenic wanderlust. Tom McGrath was born in 1978 in New Milford, Connecticut. He received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2000 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2002. The following year, he participated both in a group show at PS1/MOMA and in a solo exhibition at Lia Rumma in Naples. This is his second solo show at the Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) since his solo debut in 2002. He lives and works in New York City. Exhibition: December 16, 2004 - January 22, 2005 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 11am - 6pm LFL Gallery 530 West 24th Street USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 989 7700 Fax +1 212 989 7720 Email info@lflgallery.com www.lflgallery.com |
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