FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Saturday, May 3, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Paul Myoda's third solo show in New York. The opening reception is Saturday, May 3 from 6 to 8 pm. "Clouds" consists of 9 anthropomorphic sky-scape paintings, executed in different rectangular and circular formats.

Clouds change their shape any time and while we desire to read them as pictures, our imagination shifts with the constant flux of form. With this new body of work, Myoda explores painting for the first time and since his interest has been focused on the transformatory nature of art in all of his earlier projects, this medium seemed most appropriate for this particular topic. Furthermore, the motif itself is historically significant for the development in painting since John Constable's studies of clouds that opened an interesting sphere between representation and figuration. Some of Myoda's paintings depict male and female torsos in different states of dis- and reassemblence, suggesting the potential for psychological relationships.

Both Myoda's debut exhibition "Strawman" in 1993 and "Gargoyles" in 1995 featured hybrid sculptures and video projections that incorporated fetishlike figures which seemed to speak in an alien tongue. Joshua Decter wrote in his catalogue essay for "Gargoyles"

While Myoda's proto-language evokes aspects of residual cultural and religious symbolic languages from Asian and European sources, we must confront the problem that such symbolic economies... have today largely lost their communicative powers.

Again, Myoda has located his characters in a mythological sphere and titled the paintings according to onomatopoetic expressions. This series is an attempt to speculate about the currency of contemporary symbolic languages and also to give fresh air to an imaginative artistic practice.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.