Channel to the New Image

June 30 - August 5, 2011

535 W 22nd Street

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is delighted to announce Channel to the New Image, a group exhibition curated by Jason Murison including artists Dana Hoey, Miranda Lichtenstein, Barbara Kasten, Allison Katz, Alex Kwartler, Andrew Masullo, Rebecca Morris, Mariah Robertson, Dan Torop, and Roger White .

Channel to the New Image groups five painters and five photographers who are creating new pictures in regards to the reception of the image and the control of meaning. In most cases, the subject of the artwork is obscured through a clashing of representation, figuration, and abstraction (without a hierarchy) and/or deploying methods of production to subtly sabotage the readability of the picture as a whole. Thus, each picture’s context becomes dissolved, re-organized, re-formatted or displaced, forcing both poetic and philosophical approaches to the onset of reading the artwork.

As a curatorial effort, Channel to the New Image recalls the ease of the 1970s New Image Painting’s ambiguous formalism, but rather applying that as a strategy, these artworks float between formulaic aesthetic motifs and the complication of contemporary culture’s heavy saturation of easily read everyday images (from the internet to iPhone pix to advertising). These artworks absorb the confusion and layering of images and ask us to ascertain them through feeling rather than consumption. The exhibition calls upon a need to reexamine the viewer’s relationship with what is represented and the very nature of how we read it.