Windows, Curtains, Wall, Painting
Windows, Curtains, Wall, Painting
A site-specific installation by George Rush
Curated by Leeza Meksin
September – December 2015
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 11, 2015, 6-9pm
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Windows, Curtains, Wall, Painting, a site-specific installation by George Rush organized by Leeza Meksin. This project kicks off the start of a new initiative at OyG – a site-specific program of solo installations in the gallery’s main vestibule. Opening reception will be held on Friday, September 11, 6-9pm, and the work will remain on view throughout Fall 2015, closing in mid December.
Windows, Curtains, Walls, Painting is a site-specific installation inspired by the wall painting of Pompeii and Herculaneum and decorative wall frescoes from Roman Renaissance and Baroque interiors. Rush’s painted wall depicts an imagined modernist interior that both disrupts the existing architecture of thegallery’s entrance and provides a ghostly, apocryphal context for his painting, Couple with a Dog (2015).
Rush’s interest in Roman wall painting was inspired by Norman Bryson’s writing on the subject. In Roman wall painting, especially the fourth style from the first century CE., walls become windows, doorways, landscape, architecture, decorative folly, paintings in frames, and paintings of painted walls, creating what Bryson describes as “a quality of intense visibility”. Rush sees a parallel in this aggregate of images and framed spaces to our own time: computer desktop space, screens, glass-walled air-conditioned spaces, and projections. For this installation and other recent exhibitions in Ohio and Texas, Rush has reconsidered the possibilities of the gallery space itself to explore relationships between painting, wall, room, and window.
Rush’s new paintings on canvas are a hybrid of digital printing and hand painting. Couple with a Dog is a diptych that depicts a man and woman who are both in close proximity while sequestered to their space and time. An enormous houseplant and detritus of everyday life (beer cans, beauty products, a banana peel) signify the domestic interior, while the background seems to push forward, compressing the space, creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously full of light and highly claustrophobic.
George Rush has been exhibiting in the United States and Europe since 2001. He received an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant and a NYFA fellowship in painting, and is currently an Assistant Professor and chair of graduate studies in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. georgerushstudio.com
Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. She received a MFA from The Yale School of Art (2007), a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago (2000). Meksin has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2011, 2014), Airplane Gallery (2014) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). She has created site-specific public art installations at Brandeis University (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). meksin.com
Ortega y Gasset Projects is a gallery curated projects space in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Comprised of artists currently living in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Tennessee, OyG operates a cross-country collective and an incubator for dialogue and artistic exchange. oygprojects.com
For more information contact Leeza Meksin: leeza.meksin@gmail.com