NEW YORK, NY.- Morgan Lehman presents Up To You, Down To Me, David Rathman's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents Rathman's latest series of paintings and works on paper, which continue his exploration of everyday objects and experiences, and the stories they tell.
Rathman makes paintings that impart subjective, personal scenarios. They depict brief, fleeting narratives extracted from larger stories. Despite largely monochromatic palettes and modestly scaled works, his skill with watercolor results in dramatic atmospheric landscapes that create vivid and poignant vignettes. Rathman resonates with de Kooning's notion of "slipping glimpses"; the idea that there is beauty and meaning to be found in our ordinary day-to-day life and surroundings.
Rathman's paintings of forlorn basketball hoops, junked cars, cowboys, and rock 'n roll detritus are animated by his belief that "all objects, spaces, and people are connected to great amounts of energy." Rathman has focused his efforts in this series to expressing those energies, and to conveying the vulnerability and possibilities to be found in these iconic American images.
David Rathman lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1982. Rathmanʼs work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide, and his work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Walker Art Center (MN), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), and the Art Institute of Chicago (IL), among others.
Morgan Lehman is also presenting the exhibition An Unevening Raga, Accoutrements for an Aposiopesic Précis, vol. 3 by Rubens Ghenov in our project space. This is Ghenovʼs third installment investigating the works and practices of his heteronym, the unpublished poet Angelico Morandá (b. 1940, Spain).
Ghenovʼs paintings and sound work in vol. 3 are rooted in the life, work, and devout meditative practice of the fictive poet, who during rituals in the woods, would kneel upright between two trees wearing a shroud that only exposed his ears. To accompany the sounds of his surroundings on his investigative cerebrations, Morandá played self-made loop recordings on a cassette player and held items sourced from Jorge Luis Borgesʼ short story “The Sect of the Phoenix”.
Like Morandá meditating the difference between the sounds in his environment and the looped recording, each paintingʼs composition is purposefully asymmetrical. Rather than merely compartmentalizing, the segments of each painting catalog and mix a library of the artistʼs psyche. Ghenov also references Chaekkori, a 19th Century Korean (Joseon Dynasty) style of still life painting that used reverse perspective of scholarly accoutrements on bookshelves for the purpose of reflection and contemplation. By intermixing these diverse influences, Ghenov creates a space where fact and fiction comingle and reciprocate each other.
Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art (1999) and his Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design (2010). Ghenov has shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2013, he co-curated with Dona Nelson the 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum. Ghenov has been featured in Title Magazine, Bomb Magazine, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He currently works in Philadelphia, PA.
