Stuart Shave /
Modern Art
23-25 Eastcastle Street
London
+44 (0) 207 299 7950
Barnaby Furnas,
All At Once
June 27-July 27, 2008

Barnaby Furnas, All At Once presents new and unseen paintings Furnas made during the last two years, including works from His Rock Concerts, Effigies and Flood series.

Furnas’ uses the physicality of painting to freeze-frame the world and dissec the visual and performative landscapes he captures. His frozen images read like film stills. Furnas creates complex, often epic, spatial abstractions.

Working with techniques that form his varied painting practice, Furnas alternates through flooding canvases with paint or burning, scratching, or spraying the surface with syringes showing movement in his energetic process. Canvasses are doused as they pivot from an adjustable rig, allowing paint to run downward and across at varied points; referencing the physical nature of Abstract Expressionism as much as his beginnings growing up in Philadelphia as a graffiti artist. These vast horizontal planes are drenched in a blood vivid pigment and urethane mixture developed by Furnas to capture fast and impulsive application. The Flood Paintings have often described bloodied landscapes, overarched by luminous blue skies. Furnast has recently created these epic vistas in black paint, inverting the visceral reading to a more abstract outpouring. While alluding to the physical intensity of action painting, these canvases betray an aabstract surface, deliberately describing scenes of biblically scaled apocalypse.

In the Rock Concert series Furnas conjures diverse tricks of paint application, portraying the spectacle of violence he sees bubbling under the surface of these performances, Furnas shows them halted in an epic and graphic stasis of crescendo. In this series Furnas has documented the escalation of energy in concerts by The Melvins, The Velvet Underground, Mötley Crüe, Joy Division, and Slayer, dramatically lit from above, piercing shards of light cutting down into the band below, light seizing them midway in performance. In similar attention to figurative detail Furnas’ Effigy series are painted onto calf-skin, burned, cut and scrawled over with shamanistic intent. These works, like the Rock Concerts are built up with much tighter and more precise detailing while speaking more fluently to codes of late 19th Century French portraiture, confined to head and shoulders only.

Barnaby Furnas (b. 1973, Philadelphia) lives and works in New York and has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, Dallas, Texas in 2007 and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2005. He was also included in True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present, at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna in 2007. Other group shows have included Dream & Trauma, Works from the Dakis Joannou collection, Athens, at MUMOK, Vienna in 2007-08; Imagination Becomes Reality, Museum of Contemporary Art at ZKM, Karlsruhe in 2007; Between Two Deaths, Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007; and as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Barnaby Furnas, Before the Cross III, 2006, (panel 1 of 2), Urethane and dye on linen, First panel 76.2 x 62.9 x 3 cm, second Panel 79.4 x 62.9 x 3 cm, Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, © Barnaby Furnas, 2008.

Barnaby Furnas, Untitled (Flood), 2007, Urethane, dye and dispersed pigment on linen, 244 x 183 cm, Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, © Barnaby Furnas, 2008.