Baudrillard’s America
@ ANDREW RAFACZ
835 W. Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Saturday, June 20th, from 4PM - 7PM
On view through Saturday, July 25th
ANDREW RAFACZ continues 2015 with Baudrillard’s America, a group exhibition of new painting by Larissa Borteh, Jay Davis, Ted Gahl, Richard Galling, Andrew Holmquist, Noël Morical, Josh Reames, Adam Scott, & Wendy White. The exhibition continues through Saturday, July 25, 2015.
Addressing the ongoing, incessant argument over the end of painting at the end of meaning situated at the end of history, Baudrillard’s America presents painters working today in a variety of modes that fold dead or dying visual syntax into something uniquely reanimated. Working both as abstractionists and image-makers, these artists contend with the excess of our visual bandwidth by accepting, altering, and sublimating all of its available elements. Not content solely with a hieratic or demotic language, they instead combine and contradict without irony or hierarchy.
The title of the exhibition is taken from Baudrillard’s strange, iconic 1986 text that explores the titular country and its culture. Moreover, it is a book of and about contradictions. It is as much about the writer as what is written, a stranger in a strange land coming to terms with something at once familiar and alien. Using this as a starting point, the exhibition explores painting that is taking on the exhausting, confounding contemporary sprawl of our visual culture and rather than reacting against it, is folding it into a more radical language that sublimely betrays diplomacy. The screen is left on while other actions manifest themselves, disregarding any ontological hierarchy. And the painter is still in the picture, perhaps a more shadowy figure than ever, but still ever present, contending to stay in the frame.
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Tags: Adam Scott, Andrew Holmquist, andrew rafacz, Art, Baudrillard's America, Chicago, Gallery, Jay Davis, Josh Reames, Larissa Borteh, Noël Morical, opening, painting, Richard Galling, Ted Gahl, Wendy White, West Loop
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