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Electric Works

September 11 - November 8, 2009

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1360 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103
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On A Neck Left Right
Opening Reception September 11, 6-8 PM Electric Works is pleased to present On A Neck, a solo exhibition of Nathan Redwood’s new paintings. In this new body of work, Redwood introduces the figure by way of portraiture to his surreal, illusory vocabulary. His unique transparent brushstrokes form, sculpt, and ultimately distort the busts of these imagined subjects and the atmosphere in which they exist. Redwood’s abstracted heads recall the grotesquerie and flatness of Jim Nutt or Glenn Brown but in a fluid frenzy recognizable by his own stylized intestinal version of brushwork. Most of the heads evolve independently through a different technical approach. In one figure, the eyes, nose, and ears are transparent swirling bold lines; in another they are poured half-removed puddles or literally paint drippings. The organic and vibrant colors seen in Redwoods dynamic landscapes carry through this new imagined cast of characters. These characters strike an alternating balance between abstraction and representation. While his previous works bounced between the narrative and the construction of the narrative, On A Neck delivers a personalized vision of the portrait. Redwood’s approach to the figure mixes with popular motifs in contemporary painting such as centrifugal composition, visual puns, dark brooding expressionism, whimsy, and the portrait as icon. His figures seem to melt, float, bulge and glide across his glass-like gessoed canvases. The relevance of historical influence abounds throughout the seventeen small works on paper and canvas. In these scaled down images a more intimate, biological mark invades the portraits not seen in his previous larger works. Nathan Redwood’s work is held in numerous private and public collections. He has exhibited extensively from the Neuberger Museum of Art (New York), the Torrance Art Museum (California), at TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst (Holland) and the San Jose Museum of Art (Forthcoming). His work has been featured in, among others, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art In America and US Art, and the forthcoming issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.