BANGKOK.- Over the Influence opened New York artist Greg Bogin’s debut Southeast Asian exhibition Fly Away... at the Bangkok gallery space. The new series of paintings are a visual love letter to his wife Kyrie and this show is dedicated to her. The show will be on view until May 7th, 2023.
“I made all the work for this show after a recent visit to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The forms, shapes and colors are informed by the island, and were influenced by Polynesian art and culture mixed with fluorescent surf apparel and dreams of an island paradise”, he said.
Bogin’s brightly colored, shaped abstract works evoke a sense of joy, happiness, and optimism with a touch of irony. The shaped canvases with their soft curves and rounded edges in Fly Away… inspire a sense of levitation and airiness and are reminiscent of wings that strive to float away, defy gravity, but linger close to the earth as if weighed down by themselves.
The paintings in Fly Away… continues Bogin’s interest in shaped canvas paintings by pushing the boundary between painting and object, and merging them into one unified whole. The artist believes shaped paintings have the ability to interact with the wall and the interior space in a physical way that activates the energy in the room.
Instead of resting passively on the wall, the paintings inhabit the room by transforming the “negative space” between the pieces into an “active space”. Therefore the works become fully formed characters in a larger story by interacting seamlessly and in fluid motion with other paintings in the room.
The color perimeter tracing each work is reminiscent of golden halos found in spiritual iconography. Within Bogin’s paintings the contrast of warm and cool paints punctuated by monochromatic white emits its own halo of energy that intensifies the weightless feeling of the works, as if each painting would gently rise up and fly away.
“I see the white shapes in these paintings as a sort of blank, a stand in, a place holder for a figure, character, gesture, spirit, or ghost. I gave these white forms a high gloss finish and the color areas a matte finish so that the white gloss emanates light rather than absorbing it. I like to think of light that is being emanated as positive energy radiating from the paintings”.
The artist believes the act of painting to be a spiritual form of expression. Many hours of dedication went into making the paintings in Fly Away… and like a sacred connection between mind and body, the accumulation of paint and canvas transforms the inert materials of painting into a spiritual object.
Greg Bogin (American, b.1965) is a Contemporary painter who lives in New York and works in Brooklyn. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 1987. He has exhibited widely, mounting solo and group shows at Marlborough Contemporary, New York and London; Leo Koenig Inc., New York; Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich; Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co, Milan, Jablonka Gallerie, Koln.
