DEAN PROJECT, New York

 
DEAN PROJECT proudly opens its 2010 Fall Season with a new gallery in Chelsea and opens the space to the public with a solo exhibition by NY-based painter Bryan Drury.
 
BRYAN DRURY
Recent works - Antibiosis
 
October 14 - November 27, 2010
 
“Recent works - Antibiosis” features new and recent works by Bryan Drury. The artist’s body of work, all oil paintings completed within the past 2 years, confronts the incongruous relationship between humans and the natural world. This comes into light not by pairing two extremes against one another or by making pictorial juxtapositions. Instead, it subtly poises their contrived - and growing - separation head on with a realism that marks humanity’s detached fetishization and exploitation of nature.
 
In the large-scale oil painting Feast, the artist offers a rebuttal to this incongruity by culling a set of animals with historical, mythological, political, or anthropomorphic ties to humans. Yet in Drury’s scenario, the animals show their gratitude as they gnaw away on the corporeal flesh of a person. The painting could imply that even if humans assume dominance - through their technological advances or by mining animal (fossil) fuels as resource energy, for example - they ultimately return to earth as ordinary animal and organic material.
 
In the other paintings in the exhibition, such as Nexus (2010), the artist extends this sense of allegorical painting as an instrument to further untie the precarious relationships between the human, animal, and natural worlds.
 
Bryan Drury was born in 1980 in Salt Lake City, Utah and relocated to New York in 2001. He received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art. He has exhibited and received awards throughout the US and Europe. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
 
DEAN PROJECT was established by Mark Dean in 2007. Its debut Chelsea exhibition comes after three years of innovative exhibitions in its 2,000 sq. ft. Long Island City gallery space, located directly behind the P.S.1/MoMA Museum. The new gallery will continue to present the ideas surrounding contemporary art practice and discourse through its solo and group exhibitions featuring gallery artists, as well as, collaborations with guest artists, curators, and organizations.
 
 
Image:
Bryan Drury
Imitation, 2010
Oil on wood
84 x 60 inches
Courtesy of Dean Project, New York
 
 
DEAN PROJECT
511 West 25th Street, 2nd floor
New York, NY 10001
T +1 212.229.2017
E info @ deanproject.com
 
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